Passport Pals

The project:

PassportPals

Please be patient if it takes a while to load. It is only on the free version of Heroku and will take time.

Technologies Used

Learning resources used:

These were the most important and relevant tutorials that I used and adapted to make the PassportPals application. I discovered the youtube web scraping video first and this gave me a lot of hope. I then knew how to scrape the data I needed but hadn't worked with databases yet. Then I did the FreeCodeCamp course which taught me all that I needed to know in order to use MongoDB. The MDN Web docs tutorial was the icing on the cake that brought it all together and showed me how to take it all and put it into a live application.

Why I made Passport Pals.

Passport Pals is a passion project and my first Full-Stack Application. I have had this in my google keep for ages. It's been something I've wanted to make for a while. The idea came up while I was in Spain working as an English teacher. There are many foreign English teachers in Madrid and we all tend to hang out together. The teachers are from all over the place. Over my time in Madrid I met people from Spain (what are the odds?), Australia, England, Ireland, Philipinnes, Argentina, Canada, a load of people from the US and many more.

All of these friends I met were keen on taking advantage of our youth and proximity to the rest of Europe (except for the Irish and the English, they can eat croissants in Paris for breakfast and Paella in Valencia for dinner if they liked).

We all had varying difficulties of getting a visa to work in Spain, EU citizens had no worries, Americans had to apply for a student visa which was a bit of a hassle similar to the hassle I had faced.

When we would discuss places to travel as a group, the good old green mamba was a bit of a hindrance. Luckily I had a visa that let me move around the Schengen zone. It still made me think of the differences we experienced purely based on the place we were born and the passport we hold.

If we ever wanted to meet up in a foreign country it would be nice to see what country would be the most convenient and on our bucket lists too.

When I found this short youtube tutorial on scraping websites, I was super stoked. I thought that I had found what I needed to complete the web application. Obviously this wasn't true, but it was one step closer to the final thing. I had been chugging away at the freecodecamp syllabus in the meantime. I got to the API's and microservices section and learned about MongoDB. This was another piece of the puzzle I needed to learn the skills required to finish the passport pals application.

I had learnt about puppeteer, mongodb. I met a friend of a friend in berlin on a weekend away in february. He was a software engineer. I followed him on github and he was in the process of making a pathway to becoming a web developer. I followed his pathway and one of the things he recommended was this guide on making a fullstack localLibrary application with express, mongoDB and eventually deploying the app with heroku. This was perfect. This was the last piece of the puzzle that I needed to follow to have the skills to make a fully functioning full-stack application.