Inspiration
When I saw the news that explained almost all small businesses had lost their income due to this pandemic, which had a bad huge impact on almost the entire community in Indonesia (because 97% of jobs in Indonesia were absorbed by these small businesses), and in Indonesia, there is an institution that named cooperatives which can trick small businesses by providing capital and also access to sales owned by cooperatives (eg Retail Stores), therefore we want to help cooperatives to provide wider access to facilitate their business grow-up which has a positive impact on cooperative members and also small businesses that partner with this cooperative.
What it does
Kotakjualan provides a B2C and C2C service, which on the side of the Cooperative can sell their products on this Platform by helping their special needs such as presenting specific promos (such as buying 2 products A will get product B). On the side of the cooperative members, they can also sell their products on this platform so that they can create collaboration between cooperative members and cooperatives to achieve common prosperity.
How I built it
Because our main market is factory workers which makes them full of pressure, we want to give them as simple as possible both the UI and the UX so we are inspired by this design from AirBnB and regarding the device, usually, factory workers have limited specifications where we have to give our product as lightweight and easy to access that is why we buy a domain for that access and use Progressive Web Apps technology.On the backend side, we want to deliver our products as quickly as possible, therefore we use several technologies, such as Golang, Deno, NodeJS. And supported by database storage with MongoDB.Also on the Developer Operations side, we want to provide easy access and scalability to users wherever and whenever, therefore we use API Gateway technology, Load Balancer. And for the convenience of developing this application, we apply CI / CD to deliver our products as quickly as and safely as possible.
Challenges I ran into
Backend side because we consist of a team that has a different basic programming language so that it is difficult for us to authenticate (eg JWT), and we use a new framework for us so we have to increase the learning curve so that we can immediately implement it optimally, besides that because of our focus on the performance of our website so that we have to solve many libraries manually, and we had problems with Docker Swarm because the VPS we use uses OpenVZ virtualization which does not support access to the Linux kernel.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are new here in using the React framework, namely NextJS and the good thing is that we can implement cool features such as SWR, PWA, Webpack Cache. And we apply the programmer habit which is agile so we use Jira for our task management. We can implement a fairly difficult algorithm in Golang, which Golang is a strict language and we can make the algorithm. For the DevOps side, we can implement cool features such as Big Tech Company (XD), namely API Gateway (with Kong), Load Balancing (with Kong), Continuous Integration (with Docker Hub), Continuous Deployment (with Watchtower).
What I learned
Made a product is not hard but the problem is how we can solve their problems with our product and many many things that’s we can’t say it all of it, we start from beginner skills and now we though we can accomplish minimum global standard to developing of digital product, and we already said it on part above.
What's next for Kotakjualan
An interesting question, of course, we have a lot of desire for this sales box, but what is our focus right now is how, how to solve problems that happen to small business people in Indonesia, Lots of platforms that provide similar features, but don't see more in the problems that occur, for example, such as supplier problems to the expiration date of an item. Because of that, the sales box will focus on overcoming this, we know it is something that looks trivial but believes that some of the problems we need to explore so that we can achieve our main goal, namely deceiving the Cooperative, its Members and also small businesses partnering with cooperatives to achieve the principle of togetherness and a fair system for all entities on our platform.
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