Glass Bin Finder

The project

Bennes à verres answers an everyday, almost embarrassingly mundane problem: how many times have we held an empty bottle with no clue where the nearest collection point is? The product is intentionally single-purpose, geolocated and frictionless — no mandatory account to browse, no ads, just a map and the right answer in under a second.

My role

Solo personal project, end-to-end: data modelling, Symfony back-end, PostgreSQL database, Mapbox integration, full auth flow with email verification, and Twig UI.

Technical decisions

• PostgreSQL over MySQL — the proximity query (« nearest N bins to me ») falls out naturally from Postgres’ native geospatial functions.
• Mapbox over Google Maps — full styling control makes the map match the product identity; pricing is also more predictable for a personal project.
• Twig + vanilla JS — no front-end framework, because the map page is the whole product: a small script for geolocation and marker rendering is more than enough.
• Mandatory manual fallback — many users decline geolocation by default; an address search takes over without breaking the flow.

Takeaways

Bennes à verres taught me that a useful product doesn’t have to be big. Locking the scope to a single action — find a bin — let me ship and focus on what actually matters: load speed and map accuracy. It’s also the project that first put me face to face with the reality of geolocated UX, where a single permission denied can break everything if it isn’t planned for.