BLOOP — Web App Backend and Discord Bot Development for a Data Trading Platform

Kicking off the project: analysis of what the client already had

Our team analyzed what we had in the very beginning: a brief, a sample user journey, hand-drawn interface sketches, and a developed demo.

The client also shared with us a diagram they designed for Slack, which served as a helpful reference to begin our work on the Discord bot.

Despite the relatively limited set of source materials, our team overcame all challenges and produced the desired results.
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Development journey. Research, Challenges, and Progress

We spent two weeks on research, followed by a bit of a mixed development phase for both the bot and backend. There was no frontend from the client’s in-house team, and tackling the backend without it was challenging.

That’s why, having outlined a plan, our team started developing the bot.  While working on it, we requested some designs to fully finalize the functionality and understand what needed to be done on the backend.

The main challenge was to create the Discord bot, as our team lacked complete mockups and a full understanding of the required functionality, crucial for backend development. But by giving it all, we obtained mockups and successfully created specific endpoints.
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Aligning with customer behavior patterns and other specifics

1. Discovery. A user comes across a link or post in Discord.
2. Saving to profile. The user can save these links/posts to their profile.
3. Organizing content. They can create new collections or use existing ones to organize these links or posts.
4. Easy retrieval. Later on, users easily find a specific link or post, either through a search, within a specific collection, or in their profile.
5. Sharing. If they want to, users can share links, posts, or collections with others.
6. Collaboration and discussion. Everyone can engage in discussions about what’s shared and even add new links to collections if they have access.

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Accessing AWS resources to build and run the product

AWS is a platform with a wide range of perks that we utilized to host our client’s applications. For BLOOP, there were three AWS resources deployed in private subnets of a project’s VPC and directly unavailable from outside.

This involved RDS, ElastiCache, and OpenSearch. As BLOOP app (App Runner) can use the resources via VPC connector, we chose an EC2 bastion host to access them from outside and establish an SSH tunnel.

We chose AWS as it  features everything from servers and load balancers to databases, enabling us to build and deploy solutions in the cloud.
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Empowering development with a versatile toolkit for back-end

To meet project requirements, our team developed a fully operational product using modern and reliable backend tools: PostgreSQL, Redis, Discord API, and OpenSearch.

Such a careful selection of technologies streamlined development and guaranteed the high performance of the client’s web app and Discord bot.

Having crafted everything from scratch, our team deployed the backend on the server, launched the bot, and uploaded everything to GitHub.
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Documentation in Postman for navigation through API features

To assist the client in quickly adapting to the system, we provided comprehensive instructions in Postman — a program for sending requests to API endpoints. It also allowed us to create collections of these requests, effectively maintaining documentation.

In our case, Postman served as a library, explaining what we provided to the client and illustrating how to access user manuals, API documentation, or any other relevant resources. This approach made it easier for the client to understand and utilize the system efficiently.

Postman was our perfect choice, as here each request demonstrates the specific functions supported by the associated endpoint.
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