Townsourced Tech Blog

TLDR: Grab the code here: https://github.com/timshannon/townsourced and run docker-compose up My goal with Townsourced was first and foremost to build something useful for local, small communities. I felt local communities were very under-represented online, and the social networks available catered either to large communities or niche communities of shared interest. My target audience was small, local communities: small towns, college campuses, neighborhoods, churches, schools. I wanted to build something that handled the overlap between those local communities better than existing options.

TLDR: Grab the code here: https://github.com/timshannon/townsourced and run docker-compose up My goal with Townsourced was first and foremost to build something useful for local, small communities. I felt local communities were very under-represented online, and the social networks available catered either to large communities or niche communities of shared interest. My target audience was small, local communities: small towns, college campuses, neighborhoods, churches, schools. I wanted to build something that handled the overlap between those local communities better than existing options.

This is part two of a set of posts breaking down some of the decisions I made when putting together the web server for townsourced. The first part is here.

Instead of a general overview, like part one, this post will focus specifically on User Authentication, i.e. how to handle passwords (if at all) and session management.

When building a web application from scratch, there are a lot of decisions to make. The goal of this guide is to give one more example of how you can go about building a web application in the Go language, as well as to give you an idea what things you need to start thinking about and plan for before you get started.

This guide is not intended to be exhaustive, nor is it absolute. It is a compendium of the things I thought about and how I dealt with them when building townsourced.com. Hopefully you’ll find it useful.