Translation App

Whilst Studying Polish, I wanted to keep my vocabulary on hand to use, so I decided to create a first 200 words app. Created using Node.JS, MongoDB, Express and using Pug as the templating engine I created the app and hosted it on Heroku.

The frontend I initially set out to use materialize.css but soon found out that as a table view it didn’t handle well on mobile. Bootstrap to the rescue! Combined with Pug I think this was a good option.

Although not a huge fan of Pug and its indentation (I often find the lack of closing tags make it harder to see what you’re inside of) I do enjoy looping through data passed to the frontend with it.

The database I am storing on MLab with multiple collections for the different languages. I can then search and find entries from a particular collection when I’m on the correct URL extension.

Securing the site with a user account meant I could create a UI for the uploading of new words.

Hosting on Heroku was fairly simple, having the ability to link to a GitHub repo is nice. But unfortunately on the free account the server will need time to reboot after a period of no traffic.