Obviously we’re still at a fairly academic and philosophical step in the project, so describing the ecosystem of project structure isn’t a straightforward task.

Soft Skills

For lack of a better medium, Google Docs can be an incredibly valuable tool at this stage. I know we’re getting into gasp PM (Project Manager or Product Manager) territory, but communicating your project in a structured and natural language manner can be invaluable to drawing lines in the sands of your potential Egyptian pyramid project.

Diagramming can also a great tool for drawing, in this case literal, boundaries. UML, flow charts, or even just basic idea bubbles can all be a tool here.

Hard Skills

Because we decided to work with Node.js, NPM will be the default package manager for reading and writing modules. Yarn is a popular alternative made by Facebook to address limitations, though NPM has been admirable in evening the field.

Actually laying out your project’s modules can be done a million different ways. [create-react-app] has an inspired wrapping of responsibilities, putting most build scripts behind a package to make startup and maintenance simpler. Separating your backend API module from your front end module is also a popular pattern.

Home | Go back | Next up