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.
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.
