How we developed Workarise MVP

Workarise is a SaaS product designed for managing projects with tasks. Developing a web app that can be accessed through a custom domain like workarise.com and authenticated with an email and password is not as easy as it sounds. Here, we will share how we selected the tech stack for running Workarise.

When choosing a tech stack, the first thing to consider is where the product will be delivered. In our case, we decided to deliver Workarise on the web, due to its many advantages such as faster iterations, easier debugging and testing, and greater accessibility to users via their browsers.

JavaScript is a crucial technology for building web apps as browsers run on it. After much deliberation, we chose React, a widely used library for building web apps due to its fast iteration capability.

To save time, we integrated Material UI to build components with functionality, styled components for more specific requirements, and other JavaScript libraries like Formik/Yup for creating validations for forms, date-fns for managing dates, and more.

Initially, we did not have a backend developer to create an API, so we used Firebase, which replaces the need for an API and offers hosting, authentication, real-time database, analytics, and file uploads like images. Firebase provides a Software Developer Kit that can be used in the front to connect the Frontend app to Google Cloud services, enabling faster development with fewer people.

However, in the long term, we realized the need for an API and a SQL database. To integrate a new backend developer, we decided to use Django as a framework for our API. To host the API, we chose Cloud Run, a serverless Google Cloud service to run containers. We used Docker to containerize the API, which will help scale quickly with Cloud Run. For the DB, we can use Cloud SQL, which provides PostgreSQL, one of the most widely used SQL DB.

In summary, Workarise is built mainly with React, MUI, and Firebase, but in the future, we plan to implement an API with Django and host it with Cloud Run to scale as we grow.

-Ever Oliver