Every thing starts with an Idea, this project also started with an Idea from a colleague from rentomojo, Rohit Bind. He is a designer at rentomojo. Designer's work is in a nutshell is to create design of a good to use product. (Think Apple iPhone, Android apps, Webapps etc.)
(See the first comment for the story. Sorry to lazy to type :p )
Rohit Approached me with idea to make a small webapp which will track the number of vaccine and treatments under development. He wants to open source the webapp. The idea and the emotions behind this resonated with me so I said yes even though I am full of workload. I also thought of sharing the development of the app with you guys. A side benefit of this project. Smart no ?
Take look at design by Rohit and understand his vision.
Discuss on how to convert his vision to reality.....this is where engg and tech guys comes in.....yes we make dream come true ;)
So major things from our discussion is
- data source: From where will we get reliable up to date info. (We will somehow fetch the info)
- Database: After finding the data source we decided as we only want to display info and the data needed according to idea at this stage doesn't have much relations yet and is not frequently updated. We have decided to fetch/scrape data and store the data in strucutured format in JSON which will be loaded to display the data on frontend. Now automating this work will be work of backend guys (My colleagues Faisal, Rishu and Ujjwal)
- hosting: We will be having static content that is no constant interaction with db, or no user functionality etc. so we can use github pages to host the website
- Frontend: Since it will be static site we can use simple html, css or use React.js React is easy to maintain as we can create components, easy to extend if in future dynamic content is there, my personal preference too
NOTE: Now it would be good to have SEO. Now React out of box doesn't have SEO, we can use Server Side Rendering (Too much complex) or use tools like gatsby which converts react code to html and css ) More on this later or you can msg me later to understand this problem and decision in details or google "React SEO problems", "React SSR", "React static sites".
So we will use github pages and gatsby to make frontend. Use JSON to store data.
Story on how it started.