Show how Real Dev Engineering is done!
This is a series of stories about how Real Dev is built. Sorry for the clickbait title 🤣.
Real Dev is a platform for learning, assessing real world developer skills. As you might know (duh), Real Dev itself is built with standard web technologies. There are many interesting challenges. As our platform involves not only webpages and web servers, but also
- Asynchronous task execution
- Containerization
- Local app packaging and cross platform (our CLI!)
- Dev tools and deployments
To get started, here is a list of technologies we used, to only interest you!
AWS
We use many products: EKS, EC2, SQS, S3, CloudFront, RDS (PostgreSQL), ElastiCache (Redis), CodeBuild.
Node all the way
Our entire tech stack is based on NodeJS, including web frontend, web server, CLI. It’s a monorepo. We use Yarn, and its workspace.
TypeScript
I ❤️ TypeScript. This very philosophy of open development is borrowed from TypeScript. We want to let the world know what are we working on, how are they done. Even though we’re not exactly open sourced, but this is a start.
We use the latest TypeScript (3.6.3 as of writing).️ We set up TSLint. We use Prettier. Pretty standard, huh?
Next Nest
We use NextJS for our web frontend, and NestJS for backend. Isn’t it confusing :) I’ll show how they’re integrated in later posts.
Kubernetes
We use Kubernetes for our deployment. A friend recommended it to me, and I liked learning cool stuff. Learned it by adopting the Real Dev philosophy: Doing it on a real project, which is our platform.
Works very well, extensible, flexible. Only thing is we have to pay for EKS for its cluster. It ain’t cheap 😅.
The very fact that our core engine is built on top of containerization, makes Kubernetes very suitable for our use cases. We have a very cool feature: Deploying your submitted code live to show case what you’ve built. They’re deployed using k8s. Wanna know about it?
This is just a bird eye view of our technologies. If there’s anything specifically you’d be interested, let me know!
We always wanted Real Dev to be an open platform where everyone can come contribute and learn something out of our content, challenges, and community. Let’s help each other and make progress together!
Through a continuous stream of short/long stories, we’re going to show you how Real Dev itself is built, some of its interesting challenges and lessons, what hard problems did we encounter and how to solve them.
Also, we’re only a very small team, with limited industry experience. I’m sure we’ve done something very stupid, and hope you can point them out directly, so that we can learn as well!
Stay tuned for later posts! I’m excited to share about them, and see you all there!
