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content/elsewhere/stackstash-taking-bookish-musings-to-the-next-level/index.md

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+---
+title: "StackStash: Taking Bookish Musings to the Next Level"
+date: 2024-04-09T00:00:00+00:00
+draft: false
+needs_review: true
+canonical_url: https://www.viget.com/articles/stackstash-taking-bookish-musings-to-the-next-level/
+---
+
+We have many book lovers at Viget. Our #books Slack channel has a wealth
+of information about what books people have read and how they felt about
+them. While it's great to have access to that data, Slack doesn't
+provide the type of exploratory, visual browsing experience that would
+be most useful when trying to make decisions about what we might want to
+read next.
+
+We might wonder:
+
+-   Has anyone read Tana French's The Likeness? How did they feel about
+    it? 
+-   Liz has shared books that I've enjoyed in the past. What other
+    titles have they enjoyed?
+-   What has everyone been reading lately?
+
+During our latest Pointless Palooza, a team of 10 folks at Viget built
+an app that would help us answer those types of questions in a more
+engaging way. Rather than digging through a bunch of disparate threads
+in Slack, we can now use the StackStash app to browse consolidated
+information. It's easy to look at a book and see all of the people who
+have mentioned it (and how they felt about it) or look at a person and
+see all of the books they've mentioned (and how they felt about them).
+
+{{<dither Group-9_2024-04-08-184917_kfjg.png "800x" />}}
+
+## Behind the Scenes
+
+When we build software for clients, their business needs typically drive
+decisions around technical architecture, which then informs who works on
+the project and their role. Pointless Palooza gives us an opportunity to
+try out new technologies the team is excited about, and flex outside our
+traditional roles. With a team of six (!) engineers slated to build
+StackStash together, we needed to decide *how* to build the application
+before we got started. This decision was guided by a few high-level
+goals: 
+
+-   Get a working end-to-end version of StackStash live on the Internet
+    on Day 1 
+-   Ensure everyone on the technical team could work on something that
+    was interesting to them
+-   Distribute the workload so that we wouldn't step on each other's
+    toes 
+
+Much like everything that happens in the software development lifecycle,
+arriving at our final tech plan was an iterative process. In the days
+leading up to kickoff, we worked collaboratively to settle on a fun mix
+of technologies that play to our strengths while also giving us the
+chance to try some new things: 
+
+-   [Laravel](https://laravel.com/) for back-end data management,
+    integrations with third-party sources ([Open
+    Library](https://openlibrary.org/developers/api) and
+    [OpenAI](https://openai.com/)) and the API layer  
+-   [OpenAPI](https://www.openapis.org/) and
+    [TypeSpec](https://typespec.io/docs/getting-started/getting-started-http)
+    to define our API schema  
+-   [Remix](https://remix.run/) + [React](https://react.dev/) as the
+    view layer 
+-   [PandaCSS](https://panda-css.com/) to style the React components and
+    views 
+-   [Docker](https://www.docker.com/) for local development and
+    deployment
+
+{{<dither CleanShot-2024-04-08-at-14.01.35.png "800x" />}}
+
+## What We Learned
+
+Bringing this concept to life was not only a fun experience but also
+provided the team with the chance to learn new skills and technologies.
+Here are some of the highlights that stood out to us:
+
+### [Chris](https://www.viget.com/about/team/cmanning/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was getting a chance to work
+with Laravel, which was new to me on this project. I was surprised how
+easy it was to find most information I was looking for right in the
+main [Laravel documentation](https://laravel.com/docs/11.x). Overall, it
+was a pleasant experience coming from other popular web frameworks like
+Rails and Django.
+
+**Something I learned** was a lot more about Slack API data. There were
+a lot of little lessons I learned along the way---how message data is
+generally structured, that [\`ts\` timestamps are kind of
+IDs](https://api.slack.com/messaging/retrieving#:~:text=field.-,The,value%20is%20essentially%20the%20ID%20of%20the%20message,-%2C%20guaranteed%20unique%20within),
+etc.---but the biggest surprise was that [the conversation history
+API](https://api.slack.com/methods/conversations.history) we were
+using [didn't include message
+replies](https://www.bakejam.com/slacks-conversationshistory-api-ignores-replies/).
+You can
+retrieve [replies](https://api.slack.com/methods/conversations.replies)
+via a similar endpoint, but as you might imagine, there are a lot more
+API requests to account for.
+
+### [Claire](https://www.viget.com/about/team/catwell/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was working with a big team
+of engineers to divide technical roles and responsibilities. Based on
+experience from past client projects, we leveraged the "pods" concept,
+assigning devs in teams of two to larger focus areas. I also enjoyed
+queuing up work for everyone in a shared gist of our data spec vs.
+breaking everything out into individual tickets. This was a huge
+time-saver on the PM side and helped everyone collaborate more easily. 
+
+**Something I learned** was how to write Migrations, Factories, and
+Database Seeders in Laravel! 
+
+### [Danny](https://www.viget.com/about/team/dbrown/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was seeing similarities
+between Laravel and other web frameworks. Even though the syntax was
+pretty different, the general ideas for doing things was familiar enough
+that it was easy to pick up and understand.
+
+**Something I learned** was the interplay between Typespec, OpenAPI, and
+TypeScript. I enjoyed learning with those three tools and how they work
+together in such an enjoyable way. 
+
+### [David](https://www.viget.com/about/team/deisinger/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was getting to do some
+modern PHP. It was the first language I used for web development (in the
+late 90s 😯) but I haven't done a great job keeping up on its progress
+over the last decade. The language, frameworks, and tooling have come a
+long way. Laravel's slick, and having a language server to remind me the
+argument order to \`implode\` was pretty clutch.  
+
+**Something I learned** was how to write defensive PHP code. I was
+working on a lot of the API integrations, and I took inspiration from Go
+to be careful and explicit around failure. Also, a LOT
+about [ISBN](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN)s.
+
+### [Emily](https://www.viget.com/about/team/emcdonald/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was designing new screens
+based on the visual language and feature definition that were already
+established. 
+
+**Something I learned** was how to create animations in Figma! 
+
+### [Jackson](https://www.viget.com/about/team/jfox/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was getting more comfortable
+using AI platforms like Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude for data
+processing. I finally had a good reason to explore tools like Google's
+AI Studio to help prototype prompts that became important components in
+our data pipeline.
+
+**Something I learned** was that AI tools can do some amazing things ---
+we pulled JSON data out of Slack and had Gemini (and later GPT-4) doing
+some very impressive data extraction and summarization --- but they're
+also infuriatingly mysterious at times. Gemini and GPT both excel at
+fuzzy tasks like summarization and sentiment analysis, but completely
+fell down on lookup tasks, like gathering ISBNs for books. We eventually
+switched to GPT-4 because we couldn't get consistently valid JSON out of
+Gemini.
+
+### [Laura](https://www.viget.com/about/team/lsweltz/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was the opportunity to take
+bookish joy at Viget to the next level. I hope that StackStash will help
+my fellow book lovers find a great read the next time they're on the
+hunt for a new book.
+
+**Something I learned** was how to feel more comfortable and confident
+when using Figma to create high-fidelity designs. As a researcher, I
+primarily leverage Figma when conducting testing with prototypes. Things
+like components, variants, and autolayout can feel intimidating to
+someone who doesn't typically do in-the-weeds design work. This project
+gave me an excuse to spend dedicated time learning how to use Figma
+effectively for design production. 
+
+### [Max](https://www.viget.com/about/team/mmyers/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was seeing all the different
+pieces come together to create something meaningful. Everyone was
+working on their specific area and seeing it all intersect was really
+cool.
+
+**Something I learned** was OpenAPI and TypeSpec. It was a new
+experience for me to work with OpenAPI to develop a spec for our API and
+use that to test our API endpoints against. It really helped to make
+sure everyone was able to be on the same page with the data we expected
+in both the backend and frontend. I also got to dabble with TypeSpec to
+generate the OpenAPI spec which was also a learning experience for me. I
+enjoyed stepping out of PHP and into some new concepts.
+
+### [Nathan](https://www.viget.com/about/team/nschmidt/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was exploring all the
+different AI models that are out there and testing which one would work
+best for our project. 
+
+**Something I learned** was... Laravel, AI, Remix, and Panda CSS. Worked
+with Laravel when it first came out (8+ years ago) so there was a lot of
+brushing up and relearning. Overall really like it and would love to use
+Laravel again in another project. We went with Gemini AI to start with
+as it had a really good free tier and it seemed to return what we needed
+in a JSON format pretty consistently. But as we got more into
+integrating it into our app data we noticed that Gemini did not return
+perfect JSON every time. So we decided to change over to OpenAI as we
+can set it to format the response into valid JSON. Also learned a lot
+about Remix and Panda CSS as it was my first time working in both. There
+was a learning curve but having worked with React it was pretty easy to
+pick up. 
+
+### [Nick](https://www.viget.com/about/team/ntelsan/)
+
+**My favorite part of creating StackStash** was rapidly building a bunch
+of UI in a familiar, but not too familiar, framework.
+
+**Something I learned** was.... Laravel, Remix, more Docker magic,
+TypeSpec, and more. I spent some time working with animations, which is
+always both a treat and a slog. Getting everything set up and
+it *mostly* just working for everyone was also a nice learning
+experience.
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+We learned quite a bit during Pointless Palooza --- and had fun while
+doing so. In a short amount of time, our team successfully brought the
+concept of StackStash to life. We're excited to see how the book lovers
+at Viget make use of the tool and to potentially evolve it over time.