Week 4 (20/9 - 24/9)

Playing with Django, Laravel and Ruby-on-Rails

Documentation

This week I received feedback on my project plan, resulting in the following bullet points:

A screenshot of my notes.

My goal was to have most of these points implemented before the company visit. Some of the remarks are already covered in separate research documents, however. These will be mentioned in the project plan so as not to leave the reader with unanswered questions.

Furthermore, based on last week's meeting with Wouter, I opted to split my research into multiple different products. The feedback on this will be implemented next week.

Web Frameworks

My main project-content-related goal this week was to try out various new web frameworks to see what suits the project best. To do this, I tried the basic tutorial for Ruby-on-Rails, Laravel and Django. I took note of my personal experience with each, but one stuck out to me relatively quickly: Django.

Though Rails and Laravel offered a lot out-of-the-box, with extensive features such as autogenerating views or coming pre-dockerised they both seemed bloated and overkill. Django, in comparison, was far more clean and easy to set up. Another benefit is that it is in Python, which is a likely candidate for the analysis service. This keeps the number of languages in the project to a minimum.

In summary, my plan is to stick to Django for my web back-end needs and use its templating system for my front-end too (at least for the MVP). This can always be swapped out later.

Spoilers for next week

• Lots of documentation!

  • Edit research documents

  • Expand on portfolio

  • Update research methods in project plan

• Hopefully more work on my web app prototype