Howdy Tech Reviews

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Inspiration

We were looking for some new technology to buy like a computer and we realize how hard it is to get good technology for sure. You have to read a lot of different websites, see review videos and check the pages where they sell them from. It is a lot just to get at the end the conclusion that the product is not worth buying it. For this we thought of a solution as a website for technology reviews, just like the ones for movies, it would be easier to know by the reviews which tech are actually worth it and a good relationship price-quality

What it does

Is a webpage where technology customers can publish their own experiences and opinions of their technologies, this will help people to know if a product accomplishes what they are looking for or just to check if it is actually a good item. It lets you have an account and publish with your username so the people can find you if they think you are a good reviewer. On the other hand in the main page there is all the post just with the image, the average rate and the name of the product, when you click it you can check the whole opinion in its own page.

How we built it

We use Flask as a backend to manage the MongoDB database and connect to the React frontend. We also use Nginx to get our domain working on HTTPS:, and used Pytest and some shellcode to check that everything was working well. Besides that, we use a docker container to take to production and complemented it to deploy it automatically with Github actions. We implement a lot of monitoring tools to make sure we are aware of the website state like cAdvisor, Flask monitoring dashboard, Sentry, Prometheus, etc.

Challenges we ran into

As a team we had a huge problem because we did not know anything about reacting other than just one person, so we had to learn a lot about it and how to connect Flask with React. We also had a few trouble with the domains, sometimes they did not work as they were supposed to and we had to change the domain at some point.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are really proud that we could get the project working, we did not do so much at the beginning of it, but now we got everything working as expected. It was hard work to get the database working as we intended to, anyways we did a great job taking advantage of libraries and connect them to the frontend.

What we learned

Way too much, we learned a new workflow to have more control of the main project, learned React, JavaScript and MongoDB. We also learned more about CSS than before and get the page to look really good. We even improve in our teamwork so we are proud of that.

What's next for Howdy Tech Reviews

We want to make the experience with Howdytech as enriching as possible so we will implement more features like the main page for each product, a search bar, more uploading photos, and a table of properties. This project can grow a lot so we want to make sure it is updating and keep practicing for our users.