Project #3: Building Your Own API

Overview

You’ve already worked in small groups to accomplish various labs and exercises, but this time we’re going to challenge you to work on a whole project with a small team.

Not only will you be asked to exercise additional creativity in designing your own project, you will partner you with other classmates to architect, design, and collaboratively build an API of your own design.

While your last project taught you how to get started with Ruby, SQL, & Sinatra, this project you'll be building something exciting with Express & Mongo.

This is meant to push you both technically and collaboratively. It’s a lot harder to work in a team than to work by yourself, but that's most likely you’re going to find yourself doing in your first development job after WDI, and it's important to learn how to work together.

Make it work, and make it awesome.

Technical Requirements

Your app must:

• Use Mongo & Express to build an API and a front-end that consumes it
• Create an API using at least 2 related models, one of which should be a user
• Include all major CRUD functions in a RESTful API for at least one of those models
• Consume your own API by making your front-end with HTML, Javascript, & jQuery. React or another frame is a huge plus but not required.
• Add authentication to your API to restrict access to appropriate users
• Craft thoughtful user stories together, as a team
• Manage team contributions and collaboration using a standard Git flow on Github
• Layout and style your front-end with clean & well-formatted CSS (LESS is a huge plus)
• Deploy your application online so it's on the web and accessible
• Build Service-Oriented Architecture... host the API on one server and the client on another server that consumes your API.

Necessary Deliverables

• A working API, built by the whole team, hosted somewhere on the internet
• A handmade front-end that consumes your own API, hosted somewhere on the internet
• A link to your hosted working app in the URL section of your Github repo
• A team git repository hosted on Github, with a link to your hosted project, and frequent commits from every team member dating back to the very beginning of the project
• A readme.md file with:
  • Explanations of the technologies used
  • A couple paragraphs about the general approach you took
  • Installation instructions for any dependencies
  • Link to your user stories – who are your users, what do they want, and why?
  • Link to your wireframes – sketches of major views / interfaces in your application
  • Descriptions of any unsolved problems or major hurdles your team had to overcome

Suggested Ways to Get Started

• Don’t hesitate to write throwaway code to solve short term problems.
• Read the docs for whatever technologies / frameworks / API’s you use.
• Write your code DRY and build your APIs RESTful.
• Be consistent with your code style. You're working in teams, but you're only making one app per team. Make sure it looks like a unified effort.
• Commit early, commit often. Don’t be afraid to break something because you can always go back in time to a previous version.
• Keep user stories small and well-defined, and remember – user stories focus on what a user needs, not what development tasks need accomplishing.
• Write code another developer wouldn't have to ask you about. Do your naming conventions make sense? Would another developer be able to look at your app and understand what everything is?
• Make it all well-formatted. Are you indenting, consistently? Can we find the start and end of every div, curly brace, etc?
• Comment your code. Will someone understand what is going on in each block or function? Even if it's obvious, explaining the what & why means someone else can pick it up and get it.
• Write pseudocode before you write actual code. Thinking through the logic of something helps.

Potential Project Ideas

For this project, we want you to work with your team to build a creative product that you actually think someone will want to use. We won't have time to do tons of customer research, but take some time to brainstorm. If you're struggling for ideas, the ones below could help get you started.

Bucketli.st

Besides finishing WDI, you surely have one or two things you'd love to do with your life. Let's get 'em on paper! You could integrate with a third-party location-based API to allow users to search for a location or venue to add to their bucket list items.

Survey App

Imagine sending out a survey to everyone in the class – what should we eat for lunch today? Or 1-5, how well did you understand what we just learned? It would be even more awesome if it were realtime, so you could see answers pouring in as they're submitted.

Hello, Comments

Imagine the benefits of having an API where you could embed comments into any website you want. They could even update in realtime if you wanted, so that you'd never have to refresh the page. CMS providers across the world could quit writing code from scratch and just embed your widget instead.

Useful Resources

• MongoDB
• Express JS
• Getting Starts with Node.js on Heroku

Project Feedback + Evaluation

• Project Workflow: Did you complete the user stories, wireframes, task tracking, and/or ERDs, as specified above? Did you use source control as expected for the phase of the program you’re in (detailed above)?

• Technical Requirements: Did you deliver a project that met all the technical requirements? Given what the class has covered so far, did you build something that was reasonably complex?

• Creativity: Did you added a personal spin or creative element into your project submission? Did you deliver something of value to the end user (not just a login button and an index page)?

• Code Quality: Did you follow code style guidance and best practices covered in class, such as spacing, modularity, and semantic naming? Did you comment your code as your instructors as we have in class?

• Problem Solving: Are you able to defend why you implemented your solution in a certain way? Can you demonstrated that you thought through alternative implementations? (Note that this part of your feedback evaluation will take place during your one-on-one code review with your instructors, after you've completed the project.)

• Total: Your instructors will give you a total score on your project between:

This will serve as a helpful overall gauge of whether you met the project goals, but the more important scores are the individual ones above, which can help you identify where to focus your efforts for the next project!