For my project, which is an website/app that acts as an animal adoption site, that has the layout of a dating app like tinder/bumble, we recently started laying out our architecture framework. We decided to use react for our front-end, as its a common technology in industry, and is fairly easy to use and get started. For our backend/api server, we decided to use Flask, as much of our team is comfortable with python. For our database, we are using DataStore on GCP. We could have used some sort of SQL server, but we all had experience with datastore, and creating APIs for it.
Our UI is okay for now, but should be much more fleshed out at the end of this week. For now we have a simple layout, but are still figuring out the specifics of it, such as how to lay out the page if the login is an admin.
For our flask backend, I have gotten it mostly figured out, although It’s Wednesday, and I have already put ~30hrs into trying to deploy this server to GCP AppEngine, and have accidentally accumulated a fee of 20$ just trying to build the app. I feel like i am very close for it all to be working correctly. If i cant get it fully hosted by next week, I will probably start looking for alternatives such as Rails.
Blog post #3
So far, we’ve started making a log of great progress for our Capstone. The core operations for the API are done, we just need to get the user operations added. Originally our team set up Jira as a way of managing our project, but due to different schedules and frankly, apathy, we have opted to just use discord to communicate our progress, which thus far has sufficed.
Our team is commiting/merging code fairly often probably ever 2-3 days. I know that some people say you should commit daily, but that doesn’t work for us, as we work more so in batches, rather than daily. But this pace has worked for us as far as I can tell.
I think our project is on track so far. We don’t really have anything front-end done, but I think this wont be much of an issue. We have a layout for our app designed, we just haven’t implemented any of this in React yet. We also have to implement OAuth, which isn’t necessarily bad, but could be tricky if we get stuck
Blog post #4
I recently got a little stuck for the first time on the development of this project. From the very beginning I’ve laid out what needs to get done and when, and how it should be done. From datasource/DB, frontend framework, backend framework, ect, but I got stuck when i needed to start implementing authentication, but didn’t have a page to redirect to yet. I also have not been working on the front end pages much, so I wasn’t confident in my ability to follow the already set format. Fortunately, my team is very adaptable and productive, and my FE engineer started on a new page, while my BE engineer already started developing a different method for authentication using tokens instead of GCP credentials. For this session of being “stuck” i just let my team know what I was stuck on and what can be done to help me get unstuck.
I use AI tools semi-often now. Just starting this project, I asked chatGPT if the framework I wanted to use would be compatible, how to avoid building up a bill on GCP, what my app.yaml should be for deploying to GCP appengine, and so forth. I’m at the point where I dont want to use it like a calculator to solve every math problem I ever have, thus reducing my math skills to dust, but also it saves me a lot of time when I run into an error and it can just tell me what the issue is and how to fix it.
