Okay, so, “valspar leaderboard,” right? Let me tell you, this wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. More like a stumble through a muddy field, but we got there.
First off, the whole thing kicked off when the marketing folks came to us, the dev team, with this “brilliant” idea. They wanted a real-time leaderboard showing, like, the top-performing Valspar paint sellers. Real-time, flashy, gotta-wow-the-clients kinda thing. Classic.
My initial thought? “Oh great, another one.” But hey, gotta pay the bills. So, I started digging.
Phase 1: Understanding the Data
- I spent a solid day just trying to figure out where the heck this sales data even lived. Turns out, it was scattered across like three different databases, none of which talked to each other nicely.
- Then, cleaning the data. Oh man, the inconsistencies! “Valspar Ultra Premium” in one place, “Vspar Ulta Prm” in another. Good times. Used some Python and Pandas to wrangle that mess into something usable.
Phase 2: Building the Backend
- I decided to go with * and Express for the backend. Quick to set up, easy to prototype. Plus, I already knew it pretty well.
- Hooked up to those lovely databases (after much cursing and tweaking). Used Sequelize as an ORM to make my life slightly less miserable.
- The tricky part was getting the “real-time” updates. Polling the database every few seconds felt clunky. So, I looked into WebSockets. * seemed the easiest to get up and running.
- Got the backend spitting out JSON with the leaderboard data, broadcasting updates every, say, 5 seconds. Good enough for a demo, right?
Phase 3: The Frontend (Where the Flashiness Happens)
- This wasn’t my forte, but I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty. Used React for the frontend. Seemed like everyone was using it.
- Fetched the data from the backend using `fetch` and tossed it into a component. Basic stuff.
- Then came the fun part: making it look good. I’m no designer, so I leaned heavily on some open-source React component libraries. Material UI saved my butt.
- Spent way too long tweaking the CSS to get the colors right and the animations smooth. The marketing folks had very specific ideas about what “flashy” meant.
Phase 4: Deployment (The Real Test)
- Dockerized the whole thing. Makes deployment a breeze.
- Spin up a couple of servers on AWS. Nothing fancy, just EC2 instances.
- Set up a simple load balancer to handle the traffic.
The Result?
It actually worked! The leaderboard showed the top sellers, updated in near real-time, and looked (relatively) slick. The marketing team was happy, which meant I was happy.
Learnings?
- Data cleaning is ALWAYS more work than you think.
- WebSockets are cool, but they can be a pain to debug.
- Never underestimate the power of a good UI component library.
Overall, it was a good project. A bit stressful at times, but I learned a lot. And hey, now I can add “real-time leaderboard” to my resume. Not bad, right?
