– You can upload your cover letter and get back an analysis without an account

– Motivation for using Flask and Python

– Writing the “business logic” in a standalone script before adding a web layer

– What is NLP (Natural language processing) and what Python libraries exist for it

– Using an NLP library vs using a full text search database

– About 1,000 users a month go to the site and 50% of them upload a cover letter

– Lots of users re-upload new copies of their cover letter after making changes to it

– Server side rendered templates with Jinja plus a touch of jQuery here and there

– After submitting a cover letter, an ajax response fills in the info after ~5 seconds

– Gunicorn is used as the app server for Flask

– Why Saad chose to use Google App Engine over using Google Compute Engine

– Motivation for using Google App Engine over Heroku and other PaaS alternatives

– It’s mostly a monolithic application but with a separate script that runs locally

– The local script helps validate cover letters

– MongoDB Atlas is used to host MongoDB along with Google Cloud Storage

– Why did you choose MongoDB over PostgreSQL or another SQL database?

– MongoDB Compass is a way for you to visually explore your data

– Docker isn’t being used in development but app engine uses it in production

– nginx isn’t needed because app engine handles all of that for you

– App engine is nice but it does come at a price (it’s quite a bit more expensive)

– App engine costs won’t necessarily scale linearly with your traffic

– A run down on all of the Google Cloud services Saad is using and how they connect

– Are MongoDB databases really schemaless?

– PyMongo is used to connect the Python app to MongoDB

– It only took 4-5 days to turn the standalone script into an MVP Flask app

– Only the Python NLP libraries are note worthy libs to make this app work

– There’s no user authentication needed because no user accounts are necessary

– WuFoo is used to accept form submissions using their free tier

– WTForms is also used to process the cover letter form submissions

– Google Search Console helped make the site more mobile friendly

– The site isn’t using Bootstrap, it’s just plain old hand rolled CSS and JavaScript

– Both app engine and MongoDB Atlas provide notifications for various events

– Walking through deploying code from development to production on app engine

– Saad has tests set up with Pytest

– What exactly is that YAML file with app engine?

– Dealing with secret keys

– Both MongoDB Atlas and Google App Engine have tools for disaster recovery

– Alerts can be set up to measure resource consumption, including cost limits

– App engine’s price is high, Saad would probably use Google Compute Engine instead

– Best tips? Be mindful of the SAAS tools you use and how they interact with your app

– If you crank out code ASAP to ship an MVP, don’t forget to go back and refactor

– Using the Spyder IDE to help develop certain features faster and easier

– If you want to contact Saad you can find him on LinkedIn