The first week involved getting to know more about my mentor and the other REU students. I was also familiarized with the Agile methodology as our of way completing tasks.

Since we know that we’d be using MongoDB as our database, is just now a matter of choosing a language and framework. I have previous experience with Node.js and I know it plays well with MongoDB as JSON is native to both, so I decided to go with Node.js. Node.js is not enough to create a REST API, adding a framework would speed the development process. While I know of Express, I decided to look into other frameworks to see if I can learn something new. However, after looking into other frameworks, I decided that Express would be simple and easy enough to easily develop a prototype while allowing expandability. What I like most about Express is the use of middleware as a way to add simple functionality for the entire web application or for individual routes. I can see myself using middleware in the future to add more features such as authentication.

This week involved setting up unit tests and deployment. For testing, I used Mocha and Chai as they seemed to be the most popular. Creating the tests was a tedious task, but in the end it was satisfying. Seeing tests pass on each change was nice that I did not have to test certain endpoints myself.

This week, there was discussion within my group about whether MongoDB was a good choice for our data. Data from a learning management system is naturally relational and I spent a good amount of time deciding the relations for MongoDB. Since a RDB made more sense in this case, we decided to switch to PostgreSQL. I already made some decent progress on the Express/MongoDB project and I already had some experience working with Express and PostgreSQL together. Some ORMs that support RDBs were frustrating so I decided to switch to another framework entirely. I liked working with a Python web-framework called Flask so I started in the Python area to look for my next framework.

This week I continued to work on the conersion and ensured that all of the endpoints were working correctly. In the week’s REU meeting, I shared with my peers how to work the documentation interface and shared how to get to it.

This week, I found a solution to my problem for the project types, and I switched from using Flask’s server-rendering to React.js.

This week, I decided on a UI framework and charting library to use for the frontend. I also implemented basic CRUD for the backend models.

This week involved testing Github webhooks and process data for Recharts to understand.

This week, I focused on deploying gitlytics so that I can test it for an extended period of time.

For the last week of DREU, I worked on my final report and made a list of things to work on in the future.