Welcome to our repository!
Here you can read what we wanted to build for the competition and how; what we experienced and what we actually built.
Dstruct would have been a destructive message service where you could have sent messages like in snapchat, except that you would have been sending these messages to public and/or private walls of the application.
Each message could have been accessed for a limited time, which could have been set by the user who sent the message.
Our main goal was to make this service accessible from Slack, like Giphy. Users could have sent Slack messages to other users in the given Slack, since you can delete messages there.
We had ideas about making a feature where you would have been able set your GeoLocation, and you could have watched the messages pop up on google maps, which would have been awesome to implement. Unfortunately, we only had time to implement the map.
Also, we could have implemented Facebook, Instagram (...etc) login as well, but we ran out of time :)
We were going to use Traefik as our reverse proxy, since we wanted to use websocket to serve our realtime API. Our application would have been a monolith docker container built on Alpine Linux. Our primary DB would have been a MongoDB. We were thinking about using Redis and Varnish as well; however, these were not parts of the main idea. Rollbar for our errors, Papertrail for our syslogs, Newrelic for monitoring.
We were going to use Angular 2 and Webpack for frontend development.
So the user would have logged into the application using OAuth, after that he could have received realtime messages from the socket connection. The service would have been fast and reliable because of the QueryStream in MongoDB.
Well, this was the first time we met Engine Yard. We had a lot of trouble with customizing our environment and deployment flow. We tried out a lot of things. If the competition would have been "Who can boot up the most instances in Engine Yard" we probably would have won that.
After long and tiring tryouts we decided to go with:
HaProxy as the main proxy service, Nginx because we felt like we can't really touch this component, God as our monitoring service, REST API instead of realtime messages, Rollbar and Papertrail for logs and errors, and a MongoDB provided by MongoLab.
However, the frontend was actually built on Angular 2 and Webpack.
Well, we have a... mockup? Something like that :) We did not have enough time to wire everything, thus people can only authorize with Slack into the application, can create public channels, they can write messages with 5, 10 and 30 seconds desctruction time. If they allowed the geolocation API, the position is store to the message and all the message in a specific channel showed on the map and honestly that's all :)
Take a look at it if you would like to: https://codingsans.2016.nodeknockout.com/
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Engine Yard- is a great service, but currently it is not easy to customize anything. There are a lot of documentation for different stacks; we couldn't really tell which is for which. Chef recipes are pretty much chaos at this point, due to the same issue. It took us about one and half days just to get to the point where we could say whatever, we have our deployment flow mostly ready, let's hope the instance wont die. We liked the idea, but customization and documentation are big pain points at the moment. -
Rollbar- 10/10 would use again -
Papertrail- Great service, we set up our bunyan syslog to log there, and it worked pretty smoothly.
We really enjoyed the competition and had a great time. Next time we should make a better plan which we can deliver :) However, we learned and tried out some new stuff which is the most important thing for us! Thanks for the opportunity!
The support team on Slack was pretty quick in spite of the fact that everyone was having deployment issues, so thank you guys for that as well!
Akos Szokodi - Frontend and Backend
Laszlo 'Lacka' Csele - Frontend and Backend
Gabor 'LaTotty' Toth - Backend and third party services
Imre 'Rover' Racz - DevOps and third party services