Payroll Processor is a open source project I started in May of 2019. The general idea of the domain is from the perspective of a payroll coordinator who manages employees of a company and their payroll information. It has been a rewarding experience creating the application and working with my fellow contributors. It's long overdue but I felt the project deserved a blog post reviewing it's history and celebrating some of the modest successes it has achieved.
Humble Beginnings
In May of 2019, I was traveling home from ngConf riding the wave of excitement and eagerly looking to expand on some of the topics I had listened to during my attendence. Being a primarily .NET focused developer at the time, I was looking for a way to grow my front end skills and gain experience with Angular. As with most side projects, I quickly scaffolded out a few small features before hitting a few roadblocks while hacking together HTTP requests, debugging RxJS, and piecing together CSS until things "worked". As development slowed, the project sat for the better part of a year until a renewed interest in the project came in early February 2020. A few weeks later, Covid restrictions allowed many to begin working remotely. This freed up time for me that would have been spent commuting and allowed me to pursue the project more consistently. Around this same time, a good friend and mentor of mine Sean Wright became interested in the project and wanted to implement the backend using functional programming patterns with event sourcing and CQRS. Having multiple contributors accelerated development and allowed us both to pursue technologies we had been interested in while formalizing a clear roadmap for the project's initial implementation.
Project Structure and Technologies
The first iteration of the project consisted of 3 primary components: a .NET Core Web API, an Azure Functions project, and an Angular application. The project was configured to use VS Code's Multi-root Workspaces which enabled a cohesive development experience inside VS Code. The .NET Core Web API is built using practices from Clean Architecture and Vertical Slice Architecture with technologies like Steve "Ardalis" Smith's ApiEndpoints and GuardClauses as well as LanguageExt, and CosmosDB. The Azure Functions allowed us to explore asynchronous message handling with Azure Queue Storage and SignalR. Developing the Angular application allowed me to grow my knowledge of Angular best practices and gain familiarity with RxJS and Akita State Management.
This initial phase of building the application exposed me to a smorgasboard of modern web technologies. It really gave the project momentum as it was exciting solving problems in this domain utilizing new frameworks and patterns. With time, the project grew to include implementations of CI/CD using GitHub actions, utilizing Bogus for data generation, and Azure Bicep for infrastructure as code.
Contributors
I have to give a shout out to my fellow contributors and friends for their insights and inspirations. First, Sean G. Wright was absolutely instrumental to the project's success. Payroll Processor simply wouldn't be where it is today without his contributions. Having him to bounce ideas off of made the project rewarding and held me accountable for contributing on days when I would lose interest. I'd like to thank Justin Conklin for assisting me with his HTML and CSS talents. Finally, I'd like to thank Jonathan Keppler, David Edmiston and Pat Kelly for their feedback and allowing me to pick their brain on different approaches and patterns.
Roadmap
As I look forward, there are many technologies I am excited about trying out inside this application's ecosystem. For local development, implementing Project Tye orchestrations would be useful for quickly running the applications. I'd like to pursue adding administration features to the domain implemented in a separate SPA using Vue3 and TailwindCSS. The existing Angular app's theme could use an overhaul along with an opportunity to review accessibility practices in semantic HTML. Expanding the Continuous Deployment process to use the existing Azure Bicep scripts as a foundation would be a great way to setup for automated integration testing and eventually get a live version of the site up and running. I've been slowly piecing together a formal roadmap for the future of the project and would love to get feedback on what I can do to make it a better reference application for those that are interested.
Closing Remarks
Payroll Processor has grown to have 73 stars on GitHub which is larger than I had ever anticipated. I'm proud of the project and I'm excited to see what the future holds for it. It's great to have a sandbox application to test new technologies or patterns. I encourage others who are looking to grow their skills to pursue building side projects like this on their own or with a friend. Please feel free to reach out on Twitter if you are interested in contributing and checkout the issues page for open issues and feature requests.