Before delving into my capstone projects tech stack, I’d like to discuss a quote from one of the engineers that is working on the project that stuck with me. My group met with the founder of investormatch.ai (the capstone project I was assigned to), along with one of the engineers that works on the project, and discussed the project’s short-term and long-term goals. One thing we discussed was the tech stack and architecture of the app, including the use of the package nestjsx/crud. This node module is used to implement crud operations for all of the different routes in the application so they don’t have to be manually written. Or, as the engineer, Jebin, put it: “this isn’t like programming in the 90’s anymore where we had to write out every single crud operation for every single endpoint by hand”. Instead, we use tools that have abstracted away that type of busy work so we can spend time focusing on more challenging/interesting problems.
My initial reaction was that I felt a bit disappointed. From the little experience I have making personal projects or writing simple CRUD applications in classes at OSU, I actually really enjoy doing this type of work that gets abstracted away by tooling (maybe I just haven’t been in the industry long enough to change my mind). That being said, it shouldn’t be surprising that after several decades, programmers aren’t writing web applications the same as when the Super Nintendo came out (although much like the Super Nintendo, I sometimes get nostalgic for the www experience of the 90s as I’m bombarded with pop-ups and chatbots every time I click a link). On the other hand, I understand the benefit of developers not having to spend hours performing “menial” tasks: we are able to focus more time on domain-specific or complicated problems that can’t be solved by simply npm installing another package.
For example, this week my group and I were tasked with programmatically parsing a Word document that contains a giant unordered list of items into a specific format that can then be stored in the database and used within the application. I guess that’s a bit more interesting than CRUD 😉. In all seriousness, the way the API is set up on this project is easy to read, maintain, and extend if needed. I have never used nestjs/nestjsx before, but it seems like a great tool for building CRUD applications in an efficient and straightforward manner. I am looking forward to what other unique problems we will get to tackle in the coming weeks.
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