🗳️ UpVote – Feature Voting System

Welcome to UpVote, a simple full-stack application that lets users post feature ideas and upvote others. This project demonstrates a basic end-to-end voting system for features, including a backend API, a database, and a mobile-friendly frontend built with React Native (Expo). This project was developed with the assistance of a large language model to build a complete, end-to-end feature voting app in under 2 hours.

📌 Overview

UpVote is a feature suggestion and voting platform where users can:

✅ Submit new feature ideas
🔼 Upvote features they want implemented
📱 Use the app on a mobile device or via a web interface

🧠 Challenge Goals

This challenge simulates the type of work expected from an AI-powered developer:

Category	Goal
Prompting Skills	Clear, layered, iterative prompts to AI models
Tool Orchestration	Use AI to scaffold backend, frontend, DB, docs, and more
System Thinking	End-to-end logical data and component flow
Functionality	A working full-stack MVP experience
Multi-Platform Output	Functional UI for both web and mobile
Debugging / Edge Cases	Smart design decisions, error resilience
Prompt Logs	Included at the bottom of this README

⚙️ Tech Stack

Layer	Tool
Frontend	React Native (Expo)
Backend	Django and Django Rest Framework (DRF)
Database	PostgreSQL
AI Helped By	Claude Sonet 4
Dev Tools	Docker, `psycopg2-binary`

🔩 Features

✅ Add new features via form input
🔼 Upvote existing features
📜 List all feature requests with vote counts
🔁 Persistent storage using PostgreSQL
🚀 Easily extensible to web or other platforms

📂 Project Structure

UpVote/
├── backend/
│ ├── upvote_project/ # Django project
│ ├── manage.py
│ ├── core/ # Django app for core logic
│ ├── requirements.txt
│ └── Dockerfile # Backend Docker image
├── frontend/
│ ├── App.js # Main entry
│ ├── src/
│ └── package.json
├── docker-compose.yml # Docker Compose file
├── .gitignore
├── README.md
└── prompts.txt # 🧠 AI prompting log

🚀 Setup Instructions

Clone the Repo

git clone [https://github.com/sempedia/UpVote.git](https://github.com/sempedia/UpVote.git)
cd upvote

Run with Docker Compose (Recommended)

Make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed. This will start both the backend and frontend services.
```
docker-compose up --build -d
```
- The Backend API will be accessible at: http://localhost:8000
- The Frontend will be accessible via Expo's QR code for mobile or in your browser at http://localhost:19006.
To stop the services:
```
docker-compose down
```
Backend Setup (Manual)

If you want to run the backend manually without Docker, ensure you have Python 3.9+ and PostgreSQL installed.
```
cd backend
pip install -r requirements.txt
python manage.py migrate
python manage.py runserver
```
The API will be available at: http://localhost:8000

🧪 Sample API Endpoints

Method	Endpoint	Description
`GET`	`/api/features/`	List all features
`POST`	`/api/features/`	Create a new feature
`POST`	`/api/features/{id}/vote/`	Upvote a feature

🧠 Prompting Strategy & AI Logs

Prompting was done using Claude Sonet 4.
Logs are saved in prompts.txt, showing:
- Scaffolding of the backend and frontend
- Architecture decisions
- Error fixing
- Git setup and .gitignore
- AI-generated documentation templates

🧹 Known Limitations

No authentication (public voting)
Minimal validation on input
Flat data model (no user linkage or comments)

✅ Future Improvements

🔐 User login and roles
🧠 AI-assisted feature prioritization
💬 Comments per feature
📊 Sorting, filtering, and search
☁️ Cloud DB and deployment

🧑‍💻 Author

Alina Bazavan (@sempedia)

🪄 License

MIT License – free to use, adapt, or build on.

sempedia/UpVote