Tech Share Update
Tech Share is live at http://techshare.club/! Users have the ability to create an account secured using JSON web token (JWT) authentication. They can also create collections and add relevant content to those collections. Users also have public and private profiles where they can control the visibility of their collections. These were the most important features that I felt were needed to display the vision that I have for tech share.
I spent around seven weeks going from a blank HTML page to a functioning application and here are the major takeaways:
- Testing is not optional, when managing many views and endpoints it’s necessary to have a high degree of confidence that your code does what it is supposed to do. I followed TDD principles on this project and that is definitely something I will take forward into future projects
- I need to learn more about CI/CD. When trying to update some features recently I’ve realised how difficult it is to push my newly tested changes into production. Moving forward on Tech Share and other projects I want to begin building more efficient pipelines for pushing changes into production.
- Working on solo full-stack projects can be overwhelming if you do not break the project down into small enough features that you can easily implement. Initially, I didn’t break down the features into manageable sizes and this almost made the project look impossible. Taking the time to break down my tasks using Notion and creating something similar to user stories was crucial.
What’s next?
- Tech Share is currently in the proof of concept phase, I now need to decide if this is a viable solution to a problem and whether it is something I could take further and monetize. Either way, I have gained a lot from working on it.
- I’ll be continuing my education with the University of Alberta’s Software Design and Architecture Specialization hosted on Coursera. This is a Java focussed course that will help me understand how to build maintainable software using the best design principles and patterns. I’m particularly interested in the module on Service-Oriented Architecture.
- One of my growing areas of interest is the field of robotics and the closely related IoT field. Autonomous agents that can make decisions based on data from their environment will likely become more prevalent in society and the possibilities that it presents are very exciting. My first project will be building an autonomous robot that will be able to avoid walls and navigate around obstacles, whilst being able to sense coloured objects and faces using computer vision. This is a change of pace for me and will involve more electronics and utilizing a Raspberry Pi.
- I’ll also be continuing to improve my algorithm design abilities in Python, using Hackerrank and Leetcode to practice problems
