The flybird app is a full-stack application designed to serve twitter data from the twitter API. The front-end is written with javascript and reactjs and the back-end is written with nodejs and expressjs. As I built this application I ran into many different challenges, one of them was connecting the front-end and the back-end. I solved that by using query strings and passing the data from the front-end.
Twitter API documentation is complex and there are lot of moving parts to it but a major issue was to just get data from the api. I fixed this issue by reading through the documentation and researching online, without the correct parameters the API does not deliver data. Another issue related to the API was getting media, twitter has something called media keys in the response from the API, inorder for the media to appear the media keys need to match the content. This was fixed mostly by trial and error and using basic logic and reasoning.
As far as the design of the App -- I used a mix of CSS and react bootstrap. Both compliment each other, it was easier to use CSS to adjust minute details and bootstrap to get the overall framework of the project.
Finally another challenge I ran into was the deployment process, I tried different platforms and finally landed on render. This was my first time deploying a full-stack app, something I learnt from the process was the production process is entirely different from running the app locally. There is a lot of testing, that involves trial and error and research to get through the process. Overall I really enjoyed building this application and will have more in the future.