Deploying my first website as a full stack developer

Video Demo of the web app

How the journey began

Being a full stack developer has always been my desire and I started the journey to its realization when I got accepted into the ALX-HOLBERTON full stack one year software engineering program. As part of the course requirements at the end of my foundations (9th month), I was tasked with the responsibility of building a portfolio project of my choice in preparation for specialization in backend development.

Why I chose to build this web application

Back in school, I have always seen students and researchers looking for data analyst that can help them create visualizations for their data which they can incorporate in their scientific writing or presentation. I chose to build a web application that can allow users to interactively visualize their uploaded data as a way to solving the problem. Also, I wanted a project that will give me the opportunity to utilize and sharpen my data analysis and visualization skills using python and its libraries.

Web architecture

A simple one-server architecture was employed in the building and deployment of the website. Components of this architecture include Linux, Nginx web server, sqlite and python (django) for backend.

Frameworks, languages and tools used

For the front end development, html, css and bootstrap were used while django python web framework was used for the backend. The choice of django as backend tool was to sharpen my skills with one of the most popular frameworks used in most industries for backend. Matplotlib and pandas which are python libraries were utilized in data cleaning and visualization. Nginx was used as a webserver for serving django static files while gunicorn was used as the application server. GIT was used for version control while the whole project and tasks were organized and tracked with Trello project manager.

Challenges

• It was initially daunting understanding the flow of connections needed to render a page in django framework but with more research, it became easier
• I could complete some features in the wep app within the 3-week timeline given to complete the project. I hope to work on them going forward.

Resources

• Website link: https://www.sigmacodes.tech
• Project repository: https://github.com/DrPlain/portfolio-project_django
• Authors Github: https://github.com/DrPlain