Reading books has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It was once a hobby, then turned to be an addiction. In my quest to source for my reads (preferably eBooks) I found it so hard to obtain books from a centralized place. Most of the times I would move from one website to another looking for one that supports payment gateway available in my country. For that reason, I came up with the idea of BooktifuL.
Features
BooktifuL is meant to be a one-stop eStore for your bookish needs. I built it as my portfolio project to conclude the end of my 9 months of Foundations Curriculum at alx. The standard scheduled time is 2 weeks, just enough to have the MVP ready. I am planning to continue working on it afterwards and implement the extra features.
Implemented
1. Test-user login/signup : Users can create a BooktifuL account or login an existing one.
2. Book search : Once logged in, users can use the search bar to surf for books of their choice by typing the book title, the author name or ISBN
3. Book preview : Users can preview any book in the search results.
Not implemented yet
- Setting up login/signup Firebase database
- Searching books by genre
- Enable users to upload and sell their books
- Set payment gateways
- Enhance in-app reading experience
- Configure user-defined account settings
- Build cart feature
Team
My name is Firdaus and I am the sole developer of this project. I worked on it alone mainly to evaluate my strengths and stretch my practical working limits as a developer. While developing, I realized that my interests lie more on front-end development than back-end. I'm in the next few months, I will be specializing in front-end development.
Tech-Stack & Architecture
- Front-end: HTML5, CSS3, Vanilla JavaScript
- Framework: Bootstrap
- Libraries: jQuery
- API: Google Books API
- Host: Netlify
As a front-end developer, I decided to use jquery to fetch resources. In this MVP, BooktifuL does not have a comprehensive back-end.
Challenges
I had a not-so-easy time to figure out the best web app framework to use. The 2-week development term was not enough to learn and implement a framework (with my learning speed). I thought to use Flask, or maybe Django, but ended up using none for the MVP. I intend to advance with Django later on and scale the application.
Reflection
If I was to start over this project, I would put more time into planning and setting up resources so that I do not get destructed when building it.
Conclusion
The video below shows the current features of BooktifuL
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