United States International Music Competition Registration Portal

USIMC Registration Portal is a live portal for applicants to register for the 2017 USIMC competition. It includes rule restrictions, application editing and submission, account management, and payments through Stripe (Est. projected $30k - $40k in transactions). It's written in Python, built with Django with PostgreSQL database, SASS for stylesheets, and is hosted on a Ubuntu instance on Amazon Web Services with an Nginx+uWSGI web server. Hourly PostgreSQL dump backed up to Dropbox folder.

Building

Start a virtual environment, pip install requirements.txt, and add a .env with all deployment variables. (DEBUG, SECRET_KEY, DATABASE_PASSWORD, EMAIL_PASSWORD, STRIPE_TEST_SECRET_KEY, STRIPE_TEST_PUBLISHABLE_KEY, STRIPE_LIVE_SECRET_KEY, STRIPE_LIVE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY)

Caveats

Forms don't include complete validation and is currently a mix between Django's forms instances and custom validation. Validation of models before submission of application is also in need of refactoring, (but has sufficient unit tests to back validity).

Stuff I'm proud of

• rules.json - This JSON file handles the choices of multiple-choice fields in the model, various rule restrictions, and payment information in a single location. It was a neat solution that allowed for extremely easy adjustments to rules. It interfaces with the Python application with a wrapper "usimc_rules.py" for sufficient server side validation.
• SASS stylesheets architecture - I used a single base.scss to encapsulate all css attributes and modularized all styling of components. It's a common paradigm but it was my first time putting it into action which was really neat.
• Overall design - This was my first completely independant website, so I created a brand styling guide and complete UI design, which turned out pretty nicely.

Libraries

• Django dbbackup https://django-dbbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
• Djnago crontab https://github.com/kraiz/django-crontab
• Stripe https://pypi.python.org/pypi/stripe/
• Python dot-env https://github.com/theskumar/python-dotenv
• Crispy Forms https://github.com/django-crispy-forms/django-crispy-forms

Things I'd do differently next time

• Modularize views.py. File became huge and difficult to read
• Redo the form validation to stick to one paradigm
• Hire a separate designer and customer service worker to interface with client.
• Utilize a React + Node stack instead of Django

Helpful Links

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40564605/pip-install-mod-wsgi-fails-in-virtualenv