BoJio! Week One

Stefano Chiesa
Aug 27, 2017 · 2 min read

I was a week late to school (need to generate money) so I guess we got a week less time to do this but well, we came up with this app idea which we call BoJio! I decided to work as the backend guy for this although with my previous experience as a product engineer, I plan to help out with the frontend stuff as well once the backend is settled.

I started putting the first brick to the project, we decided to use Express.js for backend and React for frontend. It’s my first time setting up React and it turns out to be going out well!

At first, I explored setting up Facebook authentication on the backend side with Express.js https://github.com/passport/express-4.x-facebook-example. Took me a while but finally figured it out and got the endpoints for authentication done!

And then we need to do deployment before mid-point submission (argh!), I never have experience deploying Node.js app before although I have deployed couple apps to Amazon Web Service (AWS) EC2 before which took lots of trial and error. I decided to try out AWS Elastic Beanstalk and it turned out to be really amazingly easily to us. I still spent quite some time setup AWS RDS but it’s pretty easy overall compared doing it from scratch with EC2. In the end deployment is as easy as npm --prefix client run build (tried many times to automate this in AWS EB script but encountered errors, oh well I’m fine with running one more command I guess) and eb deploy which is pretty cool!

Oh yeah, we also decided to use Semantic UI with its React integration instead of the overrated Bootstrap for our front-end library 😛 👊

That’s it for this week!

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