Hello,

I am a full-time SWE currently. That mostly means in my day to day - I work on projects as directed. I don't always have to look at the big picture - or even a bigger picture. People senior to me think through the issues with an idea, and I execute.

I want to get better at thinking things through and seeing the bigger picture. For my own growth, and for career growth. I am trying to design a full system so I can become more familiar with the gamut of frameworks and technologies. I currently have in the works a project which would replicate the Stack Exchange websites with a twist.

Looking for some input & suggestions on carrying this out.

Currently I am looking at doing this almost exclusively in JS. I am thinking of using node.js as the back-end, React as the front-end, and then developing an API in Express. This I think would give me the full gamut of experience and the experience in tying whole systems together. I was thinking of trying to build my own reverse proxy using node.js for this, not sure if this is an area where using a pre-configured option like Nginx might be better? Any recommendations based on this setup for test environments? Tools recommended for CI/CD?

For the database, I am going to build it around MySQL since this is a DB I work with every day. This choice is simply to become more proficient with SQL and designing my own schema.

I am looking for any holes in this project, anything I have not covered that you think I should add. Any additional feedback is also welcome.