Coding Project: Suggestion Box - Michael Sorensen

This coding project is designed to showcase my ability to create full-stack applications. I spent roughly 8 hours on this project spread over 2 days.

How it works

Create a suggestion

You can create a new suggestion by filling out the form on the home page

Contribute to a discussion

Opening the suggestion page shows a discussion forum below the suggestion. Users can type into the available text field to add to the discussion

Getting Started

🔨 Building From Source 🔨

1. Download Node.js https://nodejs.org/en/download
2. download the source code ex. git clone [email protected]:swordensen/suggestion_box.git
3. Navigate to the server directory ex. cd server
4. Install dependencies npm install
5. Start Server npm start
6. Open a new terminal and navigate to client directory cd client
7. Install dependencies npm install
8. Start Vite server npm run dev
9. Open browser to http://localhost:5173

🐋 Building With Docker 🐋

I built this app on my windows machine. If you run into any errors using the above steps please try running the app using docker

1. Install Docker

   • Docker Desktop
   • Just Docker Engine

2. Clone the repository on to your prod server

   foo@bar:~$ git clone [email protected]:swordensen/suggestion_box.git

3. Run

   foo@bar:~$ docker compose up

Database Relationship Diagram

---
Entity Relationship Diagram
---
erDiagram
    USER ||--o{ SUGGESTION : hasMany
    USER ||--o{ COMMENT : hasMany
    SUGGESTION ||--o{ COMMENT : hasMany

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How would I improve this application given more time

Note

This is by no means a complete list

• Better error handling/ type validation
  • I added some error handling and type validation but, I know this can be improved
• More tests
  • I have some unit tests on the server side of the app but, coverage is like 5%. And there are no tests on the client side
• Use State on client
  • Because this app is so small, I elected to just use context hooks to manage state. If I had more time I would likely migrate state to zustand.
• Implement authentication
  • The app does not handle authentication at all. Authentication is currently mocked by custom middleware on the server

Notes to share with reviewer

• The app automatically generates a mock user and assigns it to all requests
• The app automatically seeds the database with 3 random users, 3 random suggestions per user and 3 random comments per suggestion per user
• A lot of my time was spent diagnosing an issue where node was having trouble finding bindings for sqlite3 Similar StackOverflow Post. After an hour of removing potential root causes I discovered the issue only occurred when installing sqlite with pnpm. I ended up just using npm to resolve the issue.