🗳️ 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

1. Clone the Repo

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

2. 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

3. 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.