Greenfielding for a Future

Saving Lives with SaverLife

While working on a project for SaverLife a non-profit whose mission is to help people save their first $400; our team was lucky enough to get clearance to greenfield the project. Our initial goal was to create an application that would show user’s financial data, and future projections for their savings and spending. We would later go past our first release canvas’ goals and implement extra features such as a carousel for the graph data, data caching with Redis, and refer a friend with SendGrid.

Sending an S.O.S. and an Email

A common technical challenge for full stack web developers is doing something you have never done before. Many of the features I discussed prior we as a team have never worked with. This creates the unique problem of not only how do I get this to work, but how do I get this to work with the language or prior code we are working with.

A feature that I worked on personally for this project with this being the case was SendGrid. This service allows your application to send emails with the SendGrid api. Hooking up this POST request was no ordinary POST request and needed an api key to access this api, and it also needed an async and await setup to function.

The api key which is needed to have access to send emails needs a sendgrid.env file. If this api key is not properly passed into the SengGrid import, the POST request will return a 401. It is important to make a sendgrid.env and not just pass it into a normal env, as that might cause issues for it, and an issue I ran into personally.

The async and await setup is also needed otherwise you receive a promise error. This is something that was mentioned to me by another programmer that had used SendGrid in the past and ran into promise issues, because of this.

Reflections From the Screen

Looking back on this experience it really highlights to me the power of working together, and communication. As programmers we are always working off examples or systems built by people we may have never even met, and yet we are still like one collective working towards the advancement for all. It is really inspiring when you think about how we can all help one another when it comes to programming even if we aren’t aware of it.