2 From little things, big things grow: Building the Photosphere backend
In this chapter, you will learn
- Starting a new project
- Making progress and taking feedback through small and simple steps
- Using live reload to minimize the distance between coding and feedback
- Building and testing a REST API with Node.js and JavaScript
- Reviewing and committing your code with Git
How do we start a new project? How do we continue a current project?
Starting a project or just trying to figure out what to do next means asking this question:
What’s the next simplest thing I can do to move forward?
We are working towards a complex application and the journey there might be difficult, but each step along the way should be simple. We make progress in development by breaking a larger, more complex job into small increments of work and taking feedback along the way. But we can’t always know ahead of time what those steps will be. So for each step forward we must start with this question: what's the simplest next thing we can do to continue making progress?
In this chapter we build the Photosphere monolithic backend through small chunks of work, giving many opportunities to gather feedback and reassess what we are doing. Our main goal is code that is working, reliable and valuable. So after each iteration of coding we will be testing our changes to keep our code working (section 1.7.3), reviewing our work and capturing our working code into version control. Strap in, coding is imminent.