From Prototype to Production in one weekend using Serverless

Last year, the #LMF team built a prototype of MAAT, a smartwatch tool to help cognitively challenged children and adults adhere to a daily schedule, an idea from teacher-turned-entrepreneur Esther Goossens.

This month, we worked on turning that prototype into something that was production ready in order to release it to a wider audience. One of the main things that needed to happen for that was rebuilding the back-end API. This had previously been built on an internal PHP framework that is no longer maintained, and wouldn’t be suitable for further development.

We only had two days to build that new backend. As with most of our recent projects, we decided to go for AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and the Serverless framework. Here’s how we did it.

Modelling the table

I remember being so confused about single-table DynamoDB database design when I first learned about it, coming from a SQL-background, but am happy to see that with every database design we do, modelling goes faster and easier, and this one only took us about 30 minutes to think over and write out.

Since we already had a API specification, there was a clear list of database access patterns available. We reviewed them and made some small adjustments to the endpoints list based on…