Orbital (Independent Software Development Project) is NUS School of Computing self-directed, independent work course. This programme gives students the opportunity to pick up software development skills on their own, using sources on the web.

What is ShopBud?

ShopBud is a web app that integrates multiple online shopping assistants/apps (tracking of order, expense tracking, group buy) into one unified web app so that it is a one stop experience for end users.

My Contributions

The bulk of my contributions goes towards the back-end work where I handled things such as the setting up of Heroku for deployment, handling communication of data from back-end to front-end, as well as assisting with some front-end work to make our app more intuitive.

Main takeaways

1. Hosting PostgreSQL database on the cloud using Heroku Postgres.
2. Creating an onboarding experience using intro.js.
3. Streamlining registration/log in process by integrating social login using django-allauth.
4. Documenting my work formally and learning Markdown and AsciiDoc in the process.
5. Learning the basics of web scraping and tying out multiple tools such as Selenium using a headless chrome/firefox browser, requests-html library and also BeautifulSoup. This was originally meant for a price tracker feature which we ultimately discontinued as e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Shopee actively blocks web scraping activities and we could not for the life of us figure out how to get past them ☹.