Memories

A full stack web application intended to mock a social media site, allows users to share pictures and provide captions and tags live. It features a responsive ui designed using react and a backend server developed using nodejs and express to host and connect to a cloud database managed by mongoDB

Purpose and Direction

Memories was my first ever MERN project that i developed under the guidance of a mentor, it was developed as a mock social media application that allows users to share images, it was one of the most important projects as it gave me a first hand experience on developing full stack applications from scratch

Stack Explanation

The application was built using nodeJs and expressjs to create a live server which could fetch data from a database i.e mongoDB, mongoDB was chosen since it was a non relational DB that was very easy to use, and react was chosen to allow for fast UI changes

Issues and Lessons Learnt

One of the biggest issues from this project was learning how to transition backend development from a development server to a live server, which meant ensuring that everything behaved the same way as it did on a live server, in this case the port i used for development was 5000 but on netlify it would be dynamic so i had to account for this, to solve this i read up on netlify documentation to try and get an idea on how to adjust the codebase for live production which is where i figured out how to use process.env to my advantage. Another issue was just managing all the files since for a big project like this, there were dozens of files, so to get around this i incorporated the MVC structure to keep things neat and tidy