Wish Lists

If I were to approach the implementation phase of this again, I would try to avoid all of the complexities of the single page applications. I would give lighter weight frameworks a chance and ditch all of the transpilation, build tools, bundlers and all of that in favour of a static site with old school Javascript; I'm sure this would speed up my development time hugely and reduce the complexity substantially.

For the back end, I think I'd be less worried about execution speed and more focused on development speed, I can always rewrite it at a later time if speed becomes an issue. I'd try to find a framework to do all of the heavy lifting for me, maybe Laravel.

CICD is invaluable, commit, push and you're done, no botched deployments, definitely worth the effort!

I built it from the ground up using a custom PHP back end, primarily by stitching a bunch of composer packages together, this worked well, but wasn't the fastest way to get up and running. For the front end code base, I used React and Redux, I would probably change this to a lighter weight stack if I were starting over.

I have a full CICD pipeline that atomically deploys each version of the application, first to a development system and then (once tagged) to the production system.

The initial version took about 5 months to create, most of it was done quite quickly, but that last little bit, the bit that polishes everything off took longer than I expected. I was also getting back into the front end web development world after a long break; wow, what a minefield, that took a while to get up to speed.

I wanted a service that was unobtrusive and didn't force me into buying from a specific outlet, that's all.

I remember using Amazons wish list to try and buy a gift for a family member's Birthday and finding the same thing cheaper from another retailer, obviously I wanted to buy the cheaper option, but if I did, the item would stay on the wish list and someone else could buy it... I called Amazon and asked their for their advice and got the less than helpful answer of "tell the person who's wish list it is and get them to mark it off", great, thanks.