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Use Node.js and Express.js to create a RESTful API.
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Use Handlebars.js as the template engine.
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Use MySQL and the Sequelize ORM for the database.
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Have both GET and POST routes for retrieving and adding new data.
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Use at least one new library, package, or technology that we haven’t discussed.
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Have a folder structure that meets the MVC paradigm.
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Include authentication (express-session and cookies).
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Protect API keys and sensitive information with environment variables.
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Be deployed using Heroku (with data).
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Have a polished UI.
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Be responsive.
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Be interactive (i.e., accept and respond to user input).
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Meet good-quality coding standards (file structure, naming conventions, follows best practices for class/id naming conventions, indentation, quality comments, etc.).
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Have a professional README (with unique name, description, technologies used, screenshot, and link to deployed application).
Our application was built on the basis that there is a need for youths in this country to have a great mentor to teach them a trade and/or career be that a trade in cooking, auto mechanic, web development, or any number of trades out there. Young people need to have an adult show them how to become an adult. Our application can be used as the mentor signing up to mentor a youth and in this process we have the mentor provide mentor email, Linked in, Twitter, Instagram for security purposes with all this information provided we put them through a rigorous vetting process i.e. employment verification, work history, social media, etc to ensure the safety of our youths. The youth's parents can also sign up providing their email, youth name, and creating a username for them to continually log into the site. After they sign up they are assigned a mentor based on their interest and hobbies. This also meets parameters of a GET and POST route based on the requirements above. We have also included a chat function where the youth can see who is currently online and reach out to the mentor outside of regularly scheduled meetings to ask questions about something they need help with or just for some advice. The chat function was successfully completed by our new technology socket.io which is a library that enables real-time, bidirectional and event-based communication between the browser and the server. This application is meant to reach all youths and mentors by being completely mobile friendly in sign up, login, and regular use. Our future development plans for this application will be to have a feature that will expand the chat box to a live face chat session so the youth can get hands on advice on current projects. Also we would like to utilize an npm package called cloudinary which would allow the mentor and/or youth to post a current picture while they are signing up to their profile.
We have learned a lot on this project about the full stack application since this project differs so much from the first project it allowed all of us time to experience frontend, backend, and even some middleware development just based on the requirements for the project. The middle ware protects the security of our users by utilizing bcrypt which is an npm library that encrypts the password that a user inputs. This has been a great project and has taught my group so much about the whole full stack dynamic of writing an application. Also we learned to work together as a group from the start we had a lot of great ideas and we essentially took all our ideas and packed it into one application. Handlebars has been a bit of a learning curve for all of us and it has made us question it but as we use it we can see the ease of it and how it would simplify large page applications.
The takeaways from this project start from use of new technologies, handlebars, databases, routes, servers, and so much more. As you can see the file is quite complex the code is also very complex sometimes we had so many files we were working with that it was hard to keep track especially on those late nights after hours of coding. It has been a great learning experience all around and these experiences are exactly what we need to have to be better web developers, team players, and allows us to be ready for our real word jobs after boot camp. Our group worked well together and worked on all facets of the project front and backend we all touched and worked with that code so that we would all get a a full stack web development experience.
