PawsConnect

📝 Project Overview

PawsConnect is a full-stack pet adoption web application built with the MERN stack that bridges the gap between animal shelters/owners and people looking to adopt. It offers an interactive catalog of pets with real-time search and multi-category filtering, dual-layer JWT authentication with HTTPOnly cookies, and role-based dashboards where adopters can track their adoption requests while owners manage their pet listings and approve or reject incoming requests.

⚙️ Tech Stack

⚡ Challenges Faced

• 1Implementing dual-layer JWT authentication with HTTPOnly cookies and custom server-side middleware to protect private routes.
• 2Preventing forced logout on hard reloads by building robust session persistence for authenticated dashboard users.
• 3Designing MongoDB queries using $regex for name search and $in for multi-category species filtering.
• 4Enforcing adoption business rules so owners can't request their own pets, and locking out competing requests once one is approved.

🚀 Future Improvements

• →Add real-time chat between adopters and pet owners.
• →Integrate image upload for pet listings instead of static URLs.
• →Add email/SMS notifications for adoption request status updates.
• →Implement pagination and advanced sorting for the pet catalog.