Peter Tao

We add sentry to monitor our node server for several reasons. We can easily see the traffic and error logs for our website in real-time. It increases the security level of our web app by providing cross-stack visibility and deep context about errors so that speed up the triaging process. Plus, it's free.

One of the key features of our project is to visualize data. As one of the most popular chart UI library, chart js can definitely deliver the task. Since we are using react, picking something that has reacted wrapper components would boost our productivity. Having a react version, chartJs let us use it in our frontend framework with ease.

We picked Express as our backend framework. Express is a fast, lightweight framework that does the job within a few lines of code. It is very easy to create middlewares and customized routing with express. It also has many useful prebuilt middlewares to handle validation and cookies. It works pretty well with any orms or frontend libraries which make the workflow easier.

We choose Heroku for our project as the deployment tool. Its CLI tool makes the deployment process painless. It allows the team to focus on development itself rather than spending too much time on setting up a production environment. For a startup project like this, Heroku also provides a great ability to scale the app easily.

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular open-sourced Databases in the market. It is widely used in large systems where read and write speeds are crucial and data needs to validate. It also supports more datatypes than other databases. Its full text search functionality would also be very helpful for our project.

As the most popular Single Page Application framework/library, React is our best choice for frontend technology. Not only it's easy to develop but also it has one of the best ecosystems amount other frontend frameworks. The starter project Create-React-App has also integrated with mainstream technologies like babel jest and webpack making development, testing, and deployment way easier.

For both frontend and backend, we need to set up a local javascript runtime environment for development. Node.js without a doubt is the best choice amount others. It is compatible extremely well with different OS. The node package manager that comes with node provides large numbers of high-quality js libraries and frameworks. In another word, Node is the foundation of the whole project.

For our editor, we use vs code. It's lightweight, fast, and powerful. It's easy to setup code format and linter so that improve the code review experience. Its integration with git allows us to easily go between commits and branches. Its extension market has a large number of high-quality plugins which can improve productivity dramatically. Also, we will be using multiple programming languages in this project and vs code support all of them.

For our frontend, since we are dealing with lots of data (possibly nested data) we need something reliable and predictable tool to manage the state and, we picked redux because it's stable and used by a large community. The middleware functionality it provides is flexible and powerful. Also, it has a good debug tool to make development more efficient.