Building a Goodreads clone

I got inspired by the Uber clone project by Juraj Majerik to learn and expand his skills. So I plan to do something similar for a project that I’ve long ignored after having some hurdles. This is a project for creating a clone of Goodreads. In my day job, I am primarily a Frontend engineer, so this project for me was to primarily improve my knowledge of the backend side of things. This post will function as an index for further blogposts that explain the day to day work.

Why am I doing this?

To Improve skills & familiarity with various backend related technologies.

• Databases (ORMs, MongoDB, NoSQL etc)
• Hosting
• Writing HTTP servers (NodeJS, Express etc)
• CI / CD

Scope of the Project

Feature list of things to accomplish

• User Signup / Login System
• Ability to create, search, tag, edit and add Books to personal collections.
• Social features to share books, book lists, post reviews, & suggest books to other users.
• Ability for book publishers to advertise books in search results.
• Ability for book collectors to collect payments for book reviews & collections.

Points to note

So the good thing is that I have already been working on a books server project for a while now and it never made any progress because I used to procastinate and also avoid working on it whenever there is a tough technical challenge to solve. Right now the books server project is very limited, It only has a basic user login / signup system (that doesn’t properly work yet) and a Book and Book review system that seems completed to me for now.

So already I think we are at an advantage but as you can see from the list above, there’s still so much more to be worked on! So let the battle begin!

Posts in this series

Creating a Login / Signup system