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The Tech Stack

We have decided on:

  • React for our frontend
  • The Formik library
  • Node.js with Express backend
  • Docker for containerization
  • Jest for testing

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Reasoning

The reasons we settled on this choice of tech stack, explained under the specific posed problems:

  • Your project has a client, with development experience and specific integration needs
    • After talking to Alex Goel, we found out that Purajuniper uses the same stack we have chosen for our front and backend development
    • If they ever want to take over the project, it should be a much more straightforward process
    • We understand this isn’t a strict requirement but it’s just an added benefit. This was a big deciding factor for us.

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  • Your team is composed of people with varying degrees of expertise across various disciplines
    • Everyone on our team has experience with all technologies so we won’t have a single point of failure. We’ve specifically chosen the stack for this reason.

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  • Your team members have different workloads, schedules and educational goals.
    • We’ve all come to an agreement that despite busy schedules, we will come together at least once a week to sync up on this project
    • We’re splitting up the work based on who wants to learn what technology more

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  • Your team might have wildly divergent hardware, or access to different hardware, but you've still got to work together
    • This tech stack would work across our divergent hardware, specifically in that we are not dependent on a platform
    • Our choice to containerize our project using docker is so that anyone using any hardware/os can run our app

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  • Your team understands and has accounted for potential risks to this approach.
    • This is our strongest shared tech stack, so from a development perspective there is a reduced risk of facing technical hurdles
    • Using the Formik library will allow us to more easily render Questionnaires, and validate responses, at the added risk of the library having it's own issues, or eventually becoming obsolete/unsupported

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Additional reasoning

  • Quick setup time so we can get to work on implementation ASAP
  • Lots of support for libraries and packages especially on the UI side of things
  • Jest was a no-brainer here as it’s the most popular and well supported testing library for JS projects.

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Other options we considered

Angular Front End

  • The main reason we didn't choose Angular is that most of the us on the team have none/limited experience. Given that there's no real benefits we can come up with, the risk it takes to go with a foreign technology comes with too many roadblocks for us to justify it.

Python Back End

  • We heavily considered a Python server framework (Flask or Django) to use for our project due to it's quick and easy setup, ease of unit testing, and for our familiarity with python. Ultimately, we chose to use Nodejs and Express as we felt keeping a full stack JavaScript environment was quite powerful (JS for front and backend has a lot of benefits such as compatibility, easier debugging, speed, etc.). Also, it's compatible with what Purajuniper is using. There was nothing particulary wrong with Python, the alternative was just better.