I posted a while ago when I first created a resemblance of an application. From that point I started calling myself a full-stack developer. I knew how to put together an app with the front-end, back-end and data access. It was a simple crud application without much use in anyone’s life.
This time it’s different. I created a web app for my girlfriend, who is a nurse, to track her shifts. The front-end is in Ionic/Angular, the authentication is with Firebase and the database and hosting are in Azure. It’s not super complex but I told her to be a demanding customer so I can feel the pressure of a real project and constantly having to deal with the flow of patching up, testing, deploying and maintaining the application.
Every day we think of a functionality that could be interesting for the app and I try to implement it. I’m learning to stream line my tests and the development flow to spend as little time as possible on trivial repetitive tasks as possible.
But I definitely need to learn more about unit testing and end to end testing for APIs so I can quickly test all my functions and not waste my time doing everything manually. One example was when I fixed the time picker and got it to show my time zone but that messed with the input of the times. It took me a couple of hours to figure out that I had to change the time zone of my Azure App Service to get it finally fixed. I just love the feeling of solving these types of problems.
Next Steps
The next few things in my list of things to learn are:
- Ionic Storage so I can build apps without depending on an external database
- Role-based authentication with Firebase, which will open up all sorts of possibilities to create apps for multiple users
- Using Cordova and capacitor to create apps that use cameras features. I’m particularly interested in voice-recognition
Ok, enough chit chat… back to work!! 🤓