"Always start with an issue"* - Basic purpose & motivations

[cloudwheels]

Who created this repo?
I'm a UK based individual operating under the GitHub handle @cloudwheels. My real name is Nigel Wheeler.

Why did you create this repo?
I'm very excited about the recent GA release of LoopBack 4.
I've been working my way through the Tutorials & Examples, Key Concepts & "How-Tos", Best Practices and information on Extending LoopBack from the LoopBack4 documentation site.

I've also been getting to grips with recent, current, upcoming and future developments through the LoopBack4 repo Issues and StrongLoop blog.

Because LoopBack's core is designed to be highly extendable it only really comes alive through the implementation of components and other extensions like decorators and custom servers.

Loopback's core team and contributors are working at a phenomenal rate to develop components which are bundled with the CLI tool to bring an increasing amount of functionality out of the box. In reality these are reference implementations rather than a part of the software's core: you can implement the functionality in these packages, extend them or ignore them completely and do it all yourself.

I got started with the CLI and saying "Hello World" smoothly, then moved on to the Todo and TodoList tutorials and the how-to on deploying to IBM Cloud.

With the pace of progress on the project I wasn't entirely surprised to hit a few roadblocks along the way. I fed back to the project's Issues (#2033, (#2038, #2040, #2041,#2050,#2051,#2072) and got very rapid and helpful responses from the team to enable me to get my app up and running.

Having now seen the power and potential of LoopBack first hand and had such a great response from its creators, I considered that I could at least try to give something back by helping out with the little mound of documentation changes my issues had created and enhance my knowledge of the framework in the process.

I also came across the shopping example, which was created as a representation an ecommerce store API. Although proposed, at the time of writing there is no tutorial for this example, but with the benefit of my experience from the previous tutorials I was able to get it up and running after some basic configuration and learn a few more LoopBack concepts in the process.

With the initial concepts examined in the earlier tutorials being replicated as the basis for creating the store, I fed back my view that it might be a more consistent learning experience across examples if they were all aligned to the process of building the store.

I suggested perhaps giving this a theme or product might make it a richer experience and that, even with the limitation of keeping the model simple to avoid boilerplate that distracted from the concepts being generated...

it would (I think) still be possible to deliver an 'End to End' experience within the built sample by 'selling' a digital 'product' served from an authorised static route.
We could bundle a couple of tiny mp3&4s, gifs etc with the sample repo: music & video loops...
A LoopStore! :)

And that is how the LoopStore was born!

I have no official connection with or approval from the project or StrongLoop, nor any assignment or commitment to any contribution to LoopBack (or even this project). This is primarily a personal learning exercise conducted in public which I hope can benefit others if possible.

Once the initial tutorial has been created I aspire to maintain and develop the tutorial as features and new package versions are released as a means of keeping up with developments, but please forgive me if I don't.

If it's a personal project to write a static tutorial, why set up LoopStore as an organisation?

• The project is personally motivated but not personal: contributions and feedback are welcome and can be better handled though the GitHub tools provided for organisations
• An personal opportunity to learn more about these GitHub tools & features

What are you actually doing?
So far I have:

• Created the LoopStore organisation
• Forked the shopping example to https://github.com/loopstore/loopstore. The aim is for convergence between this repo and the output from the full tutorial.
• Created this repo for tutorial
• Added a MIT License (for the sake of completeness)
• Added some initial content to the repo's main README
• Created this issue. ( I have no idea where Create Index of Key Concepts, How-Tos & Best Practices #1 went)

I am going to create skeleton Issues for:

• Status / CHANGELOG to manage expectations (there's no working tutorial here!) (Creating initial docs outside of this repo using Google docs? #5 )
• A better home for this little plan (ROADMAP)
• Adding information for contributors & other best practice documents (Include a section to illustrate testing strategies #4 )
• Creating two tutorial to cover code-first and schema-first design patterns (tutorial content: deploy to IBM cloud #6 )
• Creating an outline of steps & content for the tutorial (Google Cloud Shell Quickstart #10 , NPM error if port is in use? #11 ,"Always start with an issue"* - Basic purpose & motivations #12)
• Structuring the repo, eg using folders, packages, branches for different steps
• Creating initial docs outside of this repo using Google docs to examine potential use of codelabs / [Google Cloud Shell tutorials] (https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/tutorials) (Rough tutorial structure / flow #8 )
• Work through the existing getting stared, todo, todoLIst and IBM cloud deployment tutorials to apply the principles to the first stages of the LoopStore tutorial. (Built codelab output on repos GitHub Pages #9 )

Thanks for listening.

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* Always start with an issue