First Google Cloud Project

After joining Google, the first project that I decided to freelance is The Book Club. It’s a club of people (currently available via the website only) who want to share publicly about their books (or any links over the internet link) and people can like them anonymously and share their comments over it.

Now, feel free to judge me by my work. Here use it first: The Book Club Website Link.

The Book Club runs on a NoSQL DBMS system with a react UI and is fully on the cloud. It allows users to do the following:

1. Add a book title, author and URL, if logged in.
2. Add a Comment / Review associated with any book.
3. Admins can change the user credentials or upgrade others to an admin or moderator role.
4. Moderators can monitor user-generated content and remove some out of public platforms.
5. Like books/reviews and show like counts
6. Omni-Search for books

I was thinking about the various ways in which one could monetize a website. Since I have one of my own, I was tempted to explore the domain. Since that was out of scope of the project, I was super lazy again wrote out a possible direction by tring out the whole ads publishing process.

Meanwhile, I discovered the following frictions:

1. There was no single Docker image to begin developing a PHP powered website on Google Cloud Run, so I created a template DockerHub image for easily hosting a PHP-apache server: php-apache-grpc-protobuf.

2. I also realized that my teammates were more accurate in estimating my timelines just by looking at the scope of the project. It put me somewhere in a humble spot on my team of developer relations engineers. Only today, which is roughly 45 days later, I can write this blog from the first proposal.

3. I struggled with the concept of Service Accounts and providing them permissions. If you are in this spot, believe me, a lot of Google folks have felt the same issue and are actively working in various ways to address these frictions. For example, even after my first project has reached an end (hey you!! read it as my first logical conclusion in the long journey), I do not make much sense of this:

Now, I could make a good business out of this if it scales. After all, I can control the server’s cost and can literally go to Google scale well once the user counts start to grow.

Towards the end, I was very delighted with the way everything started to make sense and work properly. I made all of this over a couple of days leisurely and felt good about learning gCloud.

Enjoy the demo if you dont wanna try on your own: