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A review of the GIST app project💻
About a month ago I began to research, plan, and document for a project I called InnovateTogether Hub. The name of the actual app is GIST, but the theme of the project is InnovateTogether Hub. The basic idea is to create a platform where people from different fields and domains can come together and collaborate. It’s not supposed to be just a boring video conferencing platform but a social network for collaboration.
Today, I will be giving a review of what I have achieved in the past few weeks, my mistakes, and what I have learned.
My GitHub page: https://github.com/Dadaauth
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clement-dada-569a03207/
Twitter Profile: https://twitter.com/authorityhacks
The Project’s Repository page:
- Flask Backend: https://github.com/Dadaauth/social-net
- Next.js Frontend: https://github.com/Dadaauth/GIST-Frontend
- GIST app website URL (Ip address for now): http://34.68.36.226/
Development Process
I used Python and JavaScript programming languages for the development of this website, using Flask on the backend and next.js for the front end.
I used a MySQL database using SQL Alchemy as an ORM to connect to the database. I used the pytest library to write some unit tests but it was never completed.
I used the Python Faker library to generate data to populate my database.
Hosting:
I hosted the whole infrastructure on the Google Cloud compute engine. I used Nginx as a proxy for both the Flask and the Next.js servers. The initial plan was to use Google App Engine(GAE) and Firebase to host both servers but I ran into a problem connecting my GAE application to Google Cloud SQL. This prompted me to move my infrastructure totally to the Google compute engine even though the front end works perfectly on Firebase.
Static files are hosted on Google Cloud Storage, but there is a fallback for storing the files on the compute engine instance disk where the website is hosted.
