Project details
Background
The Nordic Council of Ministers are funding projects. Quite a lot of projects to be honest. There had been talks for years to create a "project portal", where citizens could go in examine what output the Nordic Council of Ministers generates.
All the projects are kept in an ERP system which does not enable public insight. So the web department in the organisation was asked to deliver a platform that exposes projects from the ERP system. So the time was now.
Choice of technology
This again is where Django shows its strengths and efficiency when building web applications. Very little setup and with the help of Jupyter notebook; Testing the API was a breeze.
Project and development cycle
The biggest timesink in the project was to get hold of a technical person who could tell me how to pull data from the ERP system. I got side tracked many times to obscure SOAP services and referred to well lengthy documentation but not relevant for our system, but in the end I got pointed in the right direction to a Swagger API.
With access to the Swagger API I got started and wrote some tests against the ERP in Jupyter notebooks, to familiarize myself with the structure of the data and its relations. I started building models in Django and wrote a sync command to retrieve new projects and update newly changed ones (every hour). This took less then a few days work.
When all the data was in place and in good models, I started working on the frontend. I made a mock-up in figma and got it confirmed. Built the frontend with HTML/SCSS/JS.
When the frontend was done and responsified, it was just a matter of putting all the pieces together and the project was ready for launch. This has been one of those very few and rare projects, where you see constant forward momentum and things happen fast in the right direction.
My role in the project
As in many of the other projects I've had the main role. Research, design, development, deployment has all been my responsibility.