ReUniteME – Using MERN to Help Families Reconnect with Missing Persons

Jeeva Madhaiyan — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 07:21:15 +0000

When families lose touch with loved ones — due to mental illness, displacement, or unfortunate circumstances — the process of reuniting is painful and often inefficient.

That’s where ReUniteME comes in. It’s an open-source MERN application I’ve been building to make this process more humane and effective.

For more usecase with screens click here:

🌍 The Idea

Contributors upload sightings of people (with photos automatically tagged with location metadata).
Seekers (families, friends, NGOs) can search sightings over time and geography to trace missing persons.
Admins keep the platform safe and trustworthy.

The goal: a community-powered system where every verified contribution counts toward bringing someone home.

💻 How Tech Helps

Instead of being “just another MERN project,” ReUniteME is designed around the unique challenges of real-world humanitarian use cases:

MERN stack → Quick iteration + scalability.
MongoDB normalized schema → Easier to link users ↔ contributions ↔ status updates.
AWS S3 + EXIF → Store photos and extract geo-tags directly from image metadata (no manual pinning).
Email/Phone OTP verification → Ensures reports are genuine, reducing misinformation.
JWT auth → Secure access for seekers, contributors, and admins.

🚀 What’s Next

AI-driven grouping of photos of the same person
Stronger verification (mobile, Aadhaar)
Unified contributor/seeker roles
Add heatmaps to visualize sightings.
Real-time updates (e.g., “new sighting near your area”).
Multi-language support for global use.
Partnerships with NGOs/government to bring credibility and wider reach

🤝 How You Can Help

If you’re a developer, you can:

Contribute code (frontend/backend repos on GitHub).
Suggest best practices for scaling MERN in community-driven apps.
Share thoughts on handling privacy, security, and data ethics.

If you’re outside tech:

NGOs/community orgs can explore how this could integrate with existing systems.
Anyone can share feedback or ideas to make it more reliable and humane.

🙏 Why I’m Sharing This on Dev.to

Because this is not just about building a cool app — it’s about asking:

👉 How can we, as developers, use technology responsibly to solve human problems?

If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts and contributions.

The following code from fastapi documentation under this subtitle "Response Model encoding parameters" seems to be not working

Jeeva Madhaiyan — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 11:11:06 +0000

from fastapi import FastAPI
from pydantic import BaseModel

app = FastAPI()


class Item(BaseModel):
    name: str
    description: str | None = None
    price: float
    tax: float = 10.5
    tags: list[str] = []


items = {
    "foo": {"name": "Foo", "price": 50.2},
    "bar": {"name": "Bar", "description": "The bartenders", "price": 62, "tax": 20.2},
    "baz": {"name": "Baz", "description": None, "price": 50.2, "tax": 10.5, "tags": []},
}


@app.get("/items/{item_id}", response_model=Item, response_model_exclude_unset=True)
async def read_item(item_id: str):
    return items[item_id]

"""
the variable items has no effect with the path operation
and returns the key error
"""