A Thrilling Leap Forward for Software Engineering Education in the Democratic Republic of Congo

We've got fantastic news to share, all the way from the University of Kolwezi in the vibrant Lualaba province of the Democratic Republic of Congo! The fourth-year Bachelor of Software Engineering students are diving headfirst into the world of rapid API development with the brilliant XestJS framework, and the entire XestJS team is absolutely buzzing with excitement!

This marks a significant step in equipping these future tech leaders with cutting-edge skills. The University of Kolwezi's decision to embrace XestJS underscores their commitment to providing students with industry-relevant tools that foster innovation and efficiency.

It's truly heartwarming to hear news like this. As someone deeply involved in the world of software development, there's a special kind of satisfaction in knowing that the tools we build are finding their way into the hands of eager, bright minds just starting their careers. The energy and potential that students bring to the table are always inspiring, and the fact that the University of Kolwezi has chosen XestJS as a vehicle for their learning journey is a fantastic validation of the framework's accessibility and power.

You can almost picture the students now, diving into the documentation, experimenting with routes and controllers, and maybe even encountering those initial, inevitable debugging challenges that are all part of the learning process. But through it all, they'll be gaining invaluable experience in building the backbone of modern applications, the APIs that connect everything.

From our perspective on the XestJS team, this isn't just about seeing our technology adopted; it's about contributing to the growth of the tech ecosystem in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's about empowering these students with skills that are in high demand globally and helping to foster local talent that can drive innovation within their own communities.

There's a real sense of connection that comes with knowing you're playing a small part in shaping the future careers of these individuals. We're not just providing a framework; we're offering a stepping stone, a tool that can unlock their creativity and problem-solving abilities. And honestly, there's nothing more rewarding than that. We're genuinely excited to see what these students will achieve and are here to support them in any way we can. The future of tech is bright, and it's moments like these that make us truly optimistic.

Why XestJS for The Future Tech Leaders?

The faculty at the University of Kolwezi highlighted several key reasons for choosing XestJS:

Effortless Learning Curve: "Let's be honest, getting started with new technologies can sometimes feel like climbing a mountain. But XestJS? It's refreshingly approachable. The students are quickly grasping the core concepts of API design and development without getting bogged down in unnecessary complexities. This allows them to focus on the 'why' behind the code, which is crucial for building strong developers."

The Magic of the CLI: "The Xest CLI has been a real game-changer in our initial sessions! It automates so much of the boilerplate, from generating endpoints to setting up queries. This not only boosts productivity but also introduces students to efficient development workflows right from the start. Seeing them generate a new endpoint with a simple command and watch it come to life? That's pretty rewarding!"

Built on Solid Foundations: "Knowing that XestJS is built on the robust and widely-used Node.js and Express.js, with seamless integration for MySQL and Docker, gives us confidence that students are learning on a strong and industry-relevant stack. These are the technologies they'll likely encounter in their future careers, giving them a valuable head start." Ready for the Cloud – AWS and Digital Ocean Integration! "We were particularly excited to learn that XestJS already supports deployment on both AWS and Digital Ocean! This is a huge plus for us as we aim to expose students to cloud-native development practices. The ability to seamlessly deploy their APIs to these leading platforms is an invaluable skill in today's tech landscape."

We're thrilled to be embarking on this journey with XestJS and look forward to sharing updates on student's progress and projects. We believe they have the potential to build some truly amazing things!

Until next time, Benjamin Franck.

It's always a great feeling to see an idea to see the light of day after a long ardous journey of taking it from conception to concrete reality.

I've been building Xest for the best part of last 3 years. It was conceived at JustFulfil, an ecommerce fulfiment startup I've founded in 2019. I started pulling together best parts of the Nodejs ecosystem available, also built bespoke tools and utilities around it. These utilities ranged from database query helpers, testing infrastructure, local dev environment, email template rendering, serverless functions with rolling deployments, async task scheduling systems, and many others as the company's needs grew over time.

JustFulfil was a bootstrapped startup with a small engineering team of only 3 people including me. Engineers working alongside me were my previous students from ManchesterCodes coding bootcamp, although capable and smart; they were new to building production services.

These circumstances heavily influenced the design decisions went into building our API architecture. I wanted to build something that enabled developers to get up and running quickly, and become productive from Day 1. I didn't concern myself with engineering fancies such as type safety, clean code, or any other malarkey you can find in an extreme programming workshop. My concerns were

1. are we building fast enough?
2. whether what we built is working reliably?

Since its inception, I've used Xest with my other consulting clients. We also started to teach it to our students at Cyprus in the past year. It is currently serving tens of thousands of API requests per day across multiple companies.

Enough story time, let me give you a technical overview of what Xest is and what it is currently capable of doing.

Xest is an opinionated Express API boilerplate. It comes pre-configured with:

• managing your local development workflow with Docker
• testing your API endpoints
• managing database migrations
• communicating with your database through SQL query helpers/decorators

Xest also ships with its own CLI util available under the alias xx. Xest CLI is now capable of generating CRUD queries, database migrations, seed data for your tables. I am planning to add full endpoint and endpoint schema generators soon.

In near future, Xest will be integrated with AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda and as a datastore it'll be leveraging the PlanetScale platform -- so keep watching this space! 🚀

You can get up and running with Xest straight away by installing the Xest CLI to bootstrap an API.

npm i xest -g
xx my-test-api
cd my-test-api 
xx run

Feel free to give it a go and let me know what you think :)

Until next time, E