Business and technical overview of tudoTRI

April 10, 2016 • 2 minutes read • triathlon

I’ve always wanted to build an useful website that could help others somehow. I decided to do it by combining two of my life passions: computer programming and triathlon.

The idea of this project came from a day I was looking for a particular cycling component for my bike. I had waste more than 2 hours googling it and visiting dozens of online shops. The search was really helpful, because the price was very different between each site, it was ranging from R$ 200,00 to R$ 400,00. If I had bought from the first site I found, I’d probably waste more than necessary, resulting in a bad purchase for me.

From that day on, I new that I could do something to make this experience better, for me all others athletes. It would have place in the market and it was just a matter of time until I get the first version up and running.

After a few weeks the project came to public.

tudoTRI is a Brazilian website that aggregates products from multiple local e-commences into a single place. By doing so, we are able to show our visitors what are the best offers for the products they are looking for.

Technical overview

For those who got here from my live streaming on livecoding.tv, here is a technical overview of how it was built and how I run it.

Project structure

• Core: it’s like a shared module, containing useful functions and classes that are used by the others projects;
• API: the heart of the whole application, where business rules are coded and acting as a single point of access to the database;
• Admin: the web application used by me to do administrative tasks like editing products, stores, users, configurations, etc.;
• Web: the public web site (http://tudotri.com.br);
• Bot: the crawler/scraper. His job is to visit the configured online shops to get the latests updates on prices and products;

Development Stack:

• Node.js
• TypeScript
• Express
• Postgres
• AngularJS & jQuery & Vanilla JS

Development Tools:

• Mac OSX
• Atom + atom-typescript
• pgAdmin (very buggy, does anyone have a better alternative?)

Production Environment:

• Ubuntu on DigitalOcean
• PM2 for node process management
• NixStats for server monitoring
• Cron (to start the bot periodically)

Misc.:

• The code is not open source, although you can see part of it while I’m live coding
• Code is written in English, but database and website content is Brazilian Portuguese.

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