We're going to eat bad stuff? Might as well be healthy, then!
Savorly was created to make it easier to get together and enjoy time with friends and family. They created a line of party bites and gratins to make sure they could be enjoyed in these times. And specially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when access to stores was totally limited, they realized that they had to ramp up their e-commerce efforts.
Ready or not, here we go
No matter how much people tell you this, one thing is to develop a small personal project, the other thing is when you actively start applying this to real clients, the pressure ramps up tremendously.
Going from a pre-existing store gives us even a little more pressure, because whenever we go live, we also have to be sure that whenever we make the change we have the lowest down time possible.
In our personal projects, 1 day down, its manageable. In a client scenario, 1 hour is possibly hundreds of dollars lost. And with this, we can't play. It's people's money we are dealing with.
We stand here today, in the shoulders of giants, and at least a Canadian titan
First step of building a project as a junior developer?
- Understand what are the needs of the project
- Research what are the possible best tools for this.
- Get overwhelmed by what the internet says. Because there are hundreds of different ways to tackle this challenge
- There we go, repeat this hundreds of times until we throw caution to the wind and use the tools we are familiar with
When you research e-commerce platform, after Amazon, the main players in the western hemisphere are Ebay and Shopify.
Ebay we already are familiar with and that's not the format you want to build a custom store with. That's where Shopify comes in.
So - let's recap: we had - knowledge of React, we both knew Shopify was a huge business but had never interfaced with it. Probably we did, but as customers.
Wait, can React do this?
I have already been building stuff with Gatsby before. Heck, this website is built with Gatsby. So the "Headless" CMS/ Data delivery system was not unheard of for us. So we got that covered, but when specific things were asked of us, things that are outside of our comfort zone, sh*t got real.
That's when Google and Stack Overflow come to the rescue. Thousands of lines of code written later, thousands of lines deleted and what seems like an infinite amount of debuggers and console.log we were finally able to answer multiple of our existential questions.
External API's are only as good to use as their documentations
One thing that I have got to say. You just have to love some people that literally spend time writing good code documentation. There is a huge difference between an amazing API, but sub par documentation, and an OK-ish API with incredible documentation.
Now, when I analyze an API, is totally from my teeny tiny of view. Can this give me the answer for the meaning of life? Perfect! Can you save me literally hundreds of tears and maybe a few hours of dealing with dozens of questions on Stack Overflow? Impressive, right? The more an API can abstract away things that it would take me hours to All By Myself figure it out - you can be sure that I will be singing it to the rooftops that now I am a believer.
Oh well, I got sidetracked here, but going back to the main point. Even good documentation will make a huge impact. Not only on me picking it up again later down the line when said challenge surfaces, but it will also help my happiness. The easier it is for me to read, the happier I will be using it and coding with it. I won't feel like I am climbing a hill with a blindfold on. It's totally doable. Sure! Is it advisable? I would venture not.
