I decided to build a note-taking app initially to expand my repetoire and learn new skills. Pairing my front end experience with a project that would see me engage in a range of design, development, resourcing and product tasks.

I’ve always been a bit of a compulsive note-taker, and I wanted to play with some long-gestating ideas of a simple writing web app. I designed the brand and application from the ground up, which was really fun as my day-job at the time leant towards front end development and technical architecture, so the project gave me an outlet for my design skills.

As I worked on the project, I learned a lot. I especially expanded my understanding of back-end development, building a Node GraphQL API that uses Apollo and connects to a MongoDB database to power the application’s read/write operations. I leveraged AWS Cognito to handle user authentication and authorisation.

I learned a lot as I explored hosting and architecture options, weighing up performance implications, costs, and maintenance considerations as I resourced the project in AWS. Among the technologies I explored were Terraform, Github Actions, and the Serverless framework.