Tag: v0.0.1

Hello ,

First and foremost it is cold here in Oregon, starting to feel it in my bones. Besides that though, lets chat about the the progression of Foodable; the application that will make all of our grocery shopping experiences cheaper and easier.

v0.0.1

For v0.0.1, my team and I were like a well oiled machine. We fully setup our testing and development environment. In short, we are using Docker compose to create two containers, one containing the Frontend, created with Next.js, and the other containing the Database, using the latest mongo instance. This development environment allows for fast local testing, and seamless testing in GitHub actions with Cypress, Jest, and Postman. Additionally, initial Clerk.js verification was integrated. All-in-all, the progression to get the v0.0.1 went really well and set the development team up for seamless future integrations.

v0.0.2

This version was about getting a main feature of the application functional. In this case, the main feature we decided to focus on was the main CRUD operations for the user, groceries, and recipes collections. A large component of this was to get the API structure and state management set. What this entailed was figuring out how we are going to use TanStack Query to call our API layer. As of now, we have setup the application to accomplish that task seamlessly and believe that the overall structure between TanStack and our API layer will not need any major changes in the future. Along with TanStack for managing the server-side state, we implemented an initial client-side state manager: Zustand. This will allow us to store the information that we know we are only going to need to retrieve once or at most twice throughout a users session length on the application. TanStack and Zustand were not in the initial architectural designs, however we believe that it will make the overall data management and UI / UX significantly better.

The Struggles

The team and I have agreed that we want to do this application the right way, not just the easiest. For instance, we could have easily used a simple to use database such as Firebase but we chose to use MongoDB to have the flexibility that the application should have. With this being said though, there have been some struggles. All of us have read through a lot of information and documentation about the technologies that we will use and that is time consuming. We all have jobs and busy lives outside of this project, so it can sometimes be hard to balance everything, but together we have persevered and are developing something I think is super cool.

What’s Next?

I am assuming that the next version will be v0.0.3, but you never know. For whatever the new version is called, the progression takes place over winter break. While myself and the team have agreed to work on the project, it will not be the only thing we do. Seeing family and resetting the brain is highly important for life and development. But I still plan to do a good chunk of stuff. For this next version the main things that need to get developed are:

• Finishing the Role Based Access Control (RBAC) through Clerk.js and connecting that with the MongoDB user collection.
  • This is going to be a little tricky and take some time, but is highly important for the user roles and differentiation in feature access.
• Creating navigation component for all user roles and screen types
• Creating UI for all of the pages
• Connecting TanStack query with front end components

In short, when this is done, we should be able to have a strong user flow for the application, which will allow us to create interviews with users and get feedback on the design.

Final Thoughts

The development of the Foodable application is going pretty well, all things considered. We have a really strong base and good understanding and design about how this application will be developed. Along with this, the members of the team are all now familiar with each other and a sense of trust has grown among us, allowing for good communication and nice development. I have no doubt that this application will be great and we will all continue learning a lot in the process.

Happy Holidays To Everyone!!!

If you have any questions, please feel free to comment below.