If you follow my blog, you noticed that in these past 4 months I focused mainly on my Sushi Project development. Now I can say that we have the first version of the application, obviously, a lot room for improvement but one of the main goals has been reached: "find my motivation for self learning again".
Here is the git of this project and in this post I will describe some challenges, key takeaways and insights.
The project consisted of creating a small CRUD (Create, read, update and delete) application for keep data on customer, orders and products for a Sushi Delivery family business. It was interesting to understanding the table structure of a CRUD given that I work mainly with ERP systems and their integration for analysis. As I developed the other side, I started to better understand the integration of systems like SAP S/4, M365 etc.
The first challenge of the project was to keep costs as low as possible. The company was a truly family business, therefore investing in classic Public Cloud services, such as Azure or AWS, was not an option. Also, it could lead to unexpected expenses that we could not afford. For that reason we decided to use NEON Database for storage and DigitalOcean for Cloud.
NEON Database has a free option that allows create 100 projects, 100 CU-hrs/month, 0.5 of storage per project and size ups to 2 CU/8 RAM. This sounds a great opportunity to make tests and take risks without the pressure of investment and fast results. Meanwhile, the DigitalOcean, provided a $200,00 credits for the first 5 months, and the VM investment started by $4/month. After these 5 months of on and offs, restarts and many errors, the total investment to build the first version was $4,32.
The other technologies as Ubuntu, GitHub etc were opensource.
The second challenge of developing a frontend from scratch. As a Data Engineer, frontend was not my strength, so the learning curve of understanding ports and web application was slow but steady. For this step, I worked with Claude AI. I created the wireframes, what we call in marketing as mockups, in DrawIO and added in a folder, then with Claude Code's support, I guide it to develop the HTML files from my FrontEnd while I focus in the BackEnd using Python and Flask. Working up with AI's helped me a lot to focus in the things that I was really interest and actually build logical and critical thinking from the project development. The key here was: not only ask the AI support for development, but be critical about what is being doing in each file and not accept changes without understand the reason of it.
I would say, like learning math and physics, getting the final results is easy but you need to understand how and why this result is correct. Maybe that's why Halliday and Resnick has all the answers by the end of the book.
After all these points, my last takeaways was something that my experience in marketing supported and I genuinely miss it as consultant. The chance of work within the Sushi Delivery business, in their kitchen and see the struggles in real life of taking orders, organizing the orders in the most busy days make possible to visualize the bottlenecks of the manual system and really feel where are the parts that I need to automate in order to create the application. Something similar is described in the book "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win". The feeling of going to the power plant (as in the book), kitchen (as in this project) and visualize how the processes can be transferred to the technological world is a total deal break to improve the results.
Now, I am aware that there is a huge room for improvement. From UX and UI, but also regarding the Infrastructure and CI/CD. Therefore, the next step will work along the final user and improve the details to support better their business.
Sources:
Git Project
The Phoenix Project Book