The Poor Man's Web Service - Introduction

Imagine this (happening all at once):

1. My 20-month-old son is audibly very happy or sad or both in the adjoining room.
2. A car honking nearby for some unknown reason.
3. My phone notifies me about something super interesting that I so badly need to know.
4. My mind whispers that I can watch the latest episode of my favorite web series with a few clicks right now.
5. My soul is still agitated from the recent conversation with a friend/relative about uninformed opinions on how to do a startup.
6. The constant undercurrent of fear about my dwindling savings.

In the last few months since I left my job, I have learnt to ignore all these and try to work on myMemoryStore(which is a web service) at all available times. Trying to solve the next impending hurdle to at least release a Minimum Viable Product(MVP). There are times when I fail to concentrate and waste time but I have gotten better at removing distractions in the last few months.

But when someone non-technical casually says “making a web service is not rocket science”, one needs to respond.

While I completely agree that making a web service is not rocket science but the tone in which this was delivered conveyed to me that making a web service is very trivial.

When this was said to me, to the complete disappointment of the funky side of my brain, I did not respond with some of the choicest expletives that came to mind. I did not react then. I nodded and kept quiet.

I have given it some thought and this is how I wish to react respond instead.

I will start a series of blog posts documenting what creating a fairly simple but non-trivial web service consists of.

I could have silently swallowed the urge to respond in this very lengthy way. But then, I would have missed out on the other benefits of doing this series, which are:

1. Habit of blogging regularly
2. Helping someone who is trying to build a web service.
3. Getting advice from people who know how to do things better.
4. Future reference for myself on (how to do things) or (how naive I was)

Here is the list of blog posts I will publish in The Poor Man's Web Service:

1. Introduction
2. Initial Discussion - Scope, DoD, Tech Stack, and Prerequisites
3. Lets React - Frontend Code and Setup
4. Go(ing) to the Backend - API Setup and Integration
5. AWSome Cloud Setup
6. Ready, Steady, lets CI/CD
7. Let’s hit the road, with Infrastructure as Code
8. Local Setup
9. An Asynchronous, Event Driven Backend Service
10. Observability - how to know what went wrong
11. Things to keep in mind, best practices, and the road ahead

This is a rough idea of what I think should be talked about. Expect minor changes like

• breaking up each point into multiple blog posts
• merging 2 points into one post
• changing the order.

What I will do surely is keep updating this post with the links of the post as we move along. So whatever the changes are, you can come back to this post and see the flow of posts in this series and get the links to those.

For this series, I will try to use technology that is free or has a negligible cost associated with it.

No enterprise solutions, hence the name The Poor Man's Web Service

I know of a thousand reasons for not going ahead with this endeavor. Let me know if you think this would be helpful.

Oh, by the way, let me mention this right at the beginning, I would not call myself an expert at any of these. These are things I dabble with daily and I am still very much a student. So do feel free to point out any mistakes that you find in the blog post series.

Thanks for reading.

If we have never met before. Hi, I am Nabarun Chatterjee and I am working on a product called myMemoryStore.

Do follow me on Linkedin for more content like this.

Bye.