Amr Sharaf

Github: We are using Github for version control as well as because of its various project management features like Projects, Issues and Milestones.

Travis CI: One of the most popular CI tools, it offers easy integration with Github, and makes it easy to automate builds and tests.

MailGun: Quick email integration and they have a free plan of 5000 emails/month for the first 3 months. Easy to set up and a lot of online support available.

PySpark: Using PySpark will allow us to build an infrastructure easily transferable to a distributed system without much overhead.

Firebase Realtime Database: 1- Easy to set up. 2- Has NoSQL. 3- Will integrate well with Firebase services we are using. 4- We get authentication features with minimal effort. 5- Eliminates the need of another application logic layer to serve as an API with the database i.e. the frontend can directly pull data from the database without an intermediate service.

Sentry: Sentry is a monitoring tool offering support for our front-end and back-end tech stacks. We chose to use it due to its data management support and enriched crash reports.

Airflow: Through scheduling and synchronizing the background data collection tasks (from APIs, etc.), this offers control to orchestrate the entire system through a single tool. This would be helpful when we decide to scale, but might remain low priority for the purpose of this course.

Visual Studio Code: Widely known IDE used mostly for web-development. Allows integration with great plugins.

React: 1. Constantly being developed. 2. One of the top 3 commonly used front-end frameworks. 3. Fits the team’s skills.

Python: 1. Very common for ML/Data Science work. 2. Can easily build a web server and a ML pipeline in the same application. 3. One of the most commonly used languages, will be great for recruiting developers in the future.

Heroku: Firebase Hosting is static, and thereby does not allow Python jobs to run. Since these are batch jobs that run more infrequently and do not directly face the user, Heroku is a great fit considering the free tier offers all the features we need.

Flask: 1. Easy to set up, does not have too much boilerplate code. 2. Our API will be very simple so we chose Flask over Django, which has MVC features that we don’t need.

Firebase Hosting: 1. We will use Firebase Hosting for our React client's server since it needs to be up all the time as opposed to hibernating (e.g. like in Heroku) 2. It includes a CDN for free, out of the box, so it would help with performance.