Chasing Good

The owner of the organization came to me asking for help with making a website for the organization.

She wanted a website that had a form where people could submit stories and judges would judge these stories and rate them.

The concept is an “award show” rewarding people doing good deeds.

What I needed to do was:

• Research the best solution to this situation.
• Lead the project in its direction to get a live production ready website.
• Collaborate with the owner to make changes as needed.
• Develop, Test, and Deploy the Application.
• Do maintenance to the website when needed.

First, I got my development machine set up with an Angular application.

Then, I researched ways to deploy a backend to AWS and I deployed the backend to Amplify which uses DynamoDB, AppSync, and GraphQL.

I deployed the frontend application to Amplify. Then over time refactored the deployment to utilize Docker containers and the LightSail Container Service for the Frontend.

I also collaborated with the owner to schedule a test swarm event in a research group before the application was deployed to go live on a production domain.

I debugged the findings from testing and made it worthy for the production domain.

I put the nameservers from the AWS Route 53 DNS hosted zone to the LightSail Dashboard and it was ready to be viewed and used.

I also make changes to the website on a monthly to bi-monthly basis, or whenever changes needed to be made.

The result was 2 years of successful submissions of good deeds to the organization.

The lessons I have learned developing this website was that if I want to make just a content change, and not a full adding a feature it would be simpler if I put all the content in a CMS.

My plan for the future of this website is to refactor the backend to utilize the WordPress REST API so adding content will be faster and easier than deploying a new release each time the owner wants to make a content change.