The Journey of Building the New LightOJ Website

LightOJ (https://lightoj.com) is a Bangladeshi online platform to learn programming and algorithmic problem solving. It was created around 2011 by Jane Alam Jan. This platform helped many Bangladeshi problem solvers to learn and improve algorithmic problem solving skills.

The system which was developed around 2011 was serving well, but also adding some problems. For example, it was not designed for scalability in mind, db queries became slower, UI became old and doesn’t go with the current trends.

So Jane Alam Jan vai, took initiative in late 2017 to build a new and better version of LightOJ, which will use new technologies, will be scalable and have better UI.

First problem: Tech stack

We had options to build the new backend with Node.JS, Golang or Python. We decided to use Node.JS, as most of the initial developers of the new version knew Node.JS better than other backend language.

For database, we had options MySQL or Postgres. The old lightOJ was on top of MySQL, it was working well (except some queries). But we chose Postgres as it had better JSON support and Materialized view support at that time.

So its decided. But what about the backend framework?