Dane Thomas

We initially though we would use Django because it seemed to have a lot of the things we needed out of the box. After a bit of research we realized that using Flask would be a better option since it is more flexible and would be lighter for our purposes. Having set up our REST api using Flask we believe that we did make the right decision. We found that the flexibility of Flask along with the many extensions available for it to be very appealing. We were able to add the functionality we needed without much difficulty thanks to the quality of the extensions and their documentation.

As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.

We decided to use TypeScript over JavaScript because of the additional typing capabilities. Due to the time constraints for our MVP we want to minimize the amount of time we spend debugging and increase the time we spend creating. We believe that having types will help us create clean and readable code that is easy to debug.

We decided to use React for our front end. We initially thought of using vanilla JS but during our planning future-proofing our application was a concern. Though we want to keep our app lightweight, prioritizing that now but ensuring a rewrite as our app expands, is not something we wanted to do.

Out of the current top web frameworks we went with React because of the team's familiarity with it. Additionally, the facts that React has been around for so long and has a large community made us more confident that we'd be able to get the support we need.

We decided to use Tableau as it will allow us to quickly create rich representations of our data. It can also integrate well into our app using the JS api. Additionally, our team's experience with this platform should assist with getting our prototype up and running speedily.

This was the text editor of choice for most of the members of our team before becoming a team. It's lightweight and easy to use. The wealth of extensions allows us to use the same editor for both the front and back ends of our project.

We're using GitHub for version control as it's an industry standard for version control and our team has plenty of experience using it. We also found many features such as issues and project help us organize. We also really liked the fact that it has the Actions CI platform built in because it allows us to keep more of our development in one place. We chose Slack as our main communication platform because it allows us to organize our communication streams into various channels for specific topics. Additionally, we really liked the integrations as they allow us to keep a lot of our in formation in one place rather than spread around many different apps.