Hello & welcome to Après-Ski!
This was our capstone project at The Turing School of Software & Design.
The capstone's challenge was to pitch, design, build and deploy two micro-services: a back-end RESTful API, and a front-end React web application. However, there was an added twist. Each team had to implement a new technology (see below: stretch-tech) for this project, something that they had never worked on before. All in two and a half weeks!
If you would like to see Après-Ski in action, please follow this link and select a pre-made user.
Keep reading for more about our Teams and Stretch-techs...
| Tricia Holmes | Ryan Nagel | Matt Walter |
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Our selected stretch-tech was to manage our global state using Redux and Redux-toolkit, as well as implementing a map by using mapbox-gl.
Using Redux was a really valuable experience. There was a decent amount of up front setup required, as well as a bit of a learning curve to be able to effectively use the technology, but we enjoyed the benefits of it once we were comfortable. The ability to manage state globally, instead of passing props down from one component to another, allowed us to easily use and manage the state from various components. Redux may have been heavy-handed for a project of this scope, but using it was a valuable experience for all of us.
This was the Front-End team's first time implementing a map into one of our applications, and after a bit of research, we decided to use mapbox-gl for this. Mapbox's documentation made it fairly easy to get the map displayed and add markers based on coordinates. We barely scratched the surface of what you can do with mapbox, and much more learning would have been required if we were using live coordinates, but it was a valuable experience nonetheless.
| Joseph Hilby | Kristen Nestler | Kevin Ta |
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For this capstone project, our selected stretch-tech was to create our API in a totally new language, framework, and testing framework!
We chose Python, Django, Django REST Framework, and Pytest for this project. While this choice did make the project considerably harder, we are very happy with our results. The opportunity to successfully apply our conceptual knowledge to a totally new tech-stack was invaluable. This experience, of stepping away from the primary language and frameworks we learned over the past seven months and into a new ones, let us really appreciate how much we had learned over our time studying at Turing. We also proved to ourselves that we could quickly step into a new tech-stack and be successful!