How I launched DesiShops in Canada - desishops.ca

DesiShops is a website to search desi businesses (a community of Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu language speaking) in Canada. Desi Community has most of its population from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh.Here is my journey on how I launched DesiShops in Canada

Desi Community in Canada

A Community holding a number of more than a million population in Canada has a great impact on the Canadian economy. There are a significant number of business are running by these people in the busiest Canadian cities. Despite owning a fabulous number of business, this growing community was lacking a platform where all of their businesses could be reached.

Why the idea of DesiShops?

I was having a hunch of an idea that I can bring a platform where everybody can list their business and let everybody search them. The idea of having a community’s business listing platform was not only going to fill the vacuum with its existing but enabling customers to search their language friendly businesses also.

How I made the website?

To make this idea a reality, I need to come up with a website to handle all the data with searching feature. There are many frameworks available online to do it. To go with a directory search platform was an easy choice with some limitations also. I had to choose between developing a website from scratch and having a pre-build website with directory scripts. Before making this choice, I dug into both of my options and found that directory scripts have limited scope if I need to embed features on the website later on. I made the decision to develop a website from scratch. I chose the django framework for web development.

Why I choose django?

The choice of django was more due to my previous experience of working with django. I spent a good time of my career working on django projects. I knew that I can develop a django website much faster than any other. The other reason to choose django was built-in security features of this framework. I am impressed with the security provided by django, I don’t have to worry about sql injections, xss, csrf and many other types of web vulnerabilities when I use django for development. It provides protection from all of them in its default configurations.

How much time for development?

The another challenge was developing DesiShops in a limited time. I was applying for a software developer role when I had an idea of desi shops in my mind. I got selected in an interview for a developer position in Regina, Saskatchewan and at the same time I got my logo designed for DesiShops. After starting my developer role, I kept weekends for the project DesiShop. The weekends were not enough, it took me about 4-5 weekends to give the website a shape and had an MVP ready. There were many small changes that need to be done yet, and I am thankful for the Christmas and New year holidays from my employer. I had 10 days for development, and I did not miss any night. I got it finally !!

Launching DesiShops !!

Now, I had the website ready. The next step were to upload code on a hosting server and serve django code with a server program. I was doing my dev-ops and already got my server set up for holidays. Finally, the day came and desi shops was online at www.desishops.ca. I was writing social media posts, sending texts, making calls, and thanking to God that he stayed with me until this idea was shaped into reality from just an idea.

I am grateful to all my friends, family, and supporters who always have my back in my projects.