This repository contains my solution to the programming compoment of the 8th Light prescreen assessment. Find it in the wild here.
- Express
✈️ because I'd never tried it before. - React ⚛️ because I have tried it before.
- Parcel 🎁 because why config your bundler...?
- Bulma 📗 because style is hard.
- Sass 💃🏽 because Bulma.
- Jest 🤡 because it's supposed to be fun...
Run this project and develop it locally. Please ensure you have the latest versions of node and npm.
(If you use nvm)
nvm useFirst, install dependencies.
npm installNow, you'll need to create a .env for local server configuration. Note: a Google Books API key is required to do this.
URL=https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes
API_KEY=<YOUR_VERY_OWN_API_KEY>
PORT=<YOUR_FAVORITE_PORT>
With these environment variables set, simply run the following.
npm run start-allThis will run and watch all tests, watch and build frontend assets, and serve them.
Writing this application presented challenges that I had never come up against before. I committed to making this app full-stack from the get go, rather than going for a SPA static site. I wanted to be able to keep stuff like my API key hidden on the server, plus I'm generally not a huge fan of the static SPA anyway.
The biggest challenge was dealing with the mixture of frontend and backend JS. I would have used Python were it not for the caveat that I couldn't use the same language as I used for the other part of the challenge. I've been writing a good deal of React lately, so I pretty much completely forgot about the mechanics of require and its associated acts. I've been spoiling myself with 0 config compilation (the way it should be, imo) by using Parcel as well.
I probably spent around 2.5 hours trying to import my helpers module into my tests before realizing that I had a sort of tenous setup mixing 2 flavors of JS with this application. Many .babelrcs were copy-pasted, but I managed to roll it back to 0 in the end. Unfortunately, I ended up having to brute-force my tests for helpers by copy-pasting code since the mix of ES*/Node in this codebase + time constaints prevented a clean solution to testing different flavors of JS at once.
This app ended up having a much richer client side than I expected, which is not usually my preference. In retrospect, a lot of my testing issues could have been alleviated if I did stuff like manipulating text or substituting missing images server side. Overall, I'm happy to have gotten it where it's at and happy to have been given the opportunity to complete this challenge. It was great to further hone my recently acquired vim/tmux skills, and I think I'm a fan of express now.