As a user, I want to confirm my subscription to the newsletter, so that I don't receive random unwanted subscriptions.

Acceptance criteria

• The link in the email would look like something like https://deals.gordon-pn.com/confirm/aebafcacecf7fa16a68f6b26b0abfcee (or use parameters)
• When the link is clicked, search the database for a matching hash and set confirmed column to true
• Show a page to the user to say that their email has been confirmed successfully
• Adjust newsletter service to only email those with confirmed emails
• If a user subscribes again, then simply send a new confirmation email but do not add a row

Depends on

• Unsubscribe and subscribe feature

References

As a user, I want also want to receive notifications for freebies and coupons, so that I don't miss out of those.

References

https://forums.redflagdeals.com/freebies-f12/
https://forums.redflagdeals.com/coupons-f136/

Scrape these additional forums, the format seems to be the same as the Hot Deals forum so maybe the method can be extracted and reused, just passing the URL as parameter.

The problem

Some deals are very "hot" and expire very quickly. By the time I receive the next newsletter, the deal has already expired.

Possible solution

Post to a Slack webhook to notify of new deals.

As a user, I want daily email newsletters, so that I can stay up-to-date with deals without needing to check the forums.

Acceptance criteria:

• Read from a DB table to get list of subscribers
• Queries unseen deals from DB
• Automated daily emails to subscribers
• Does not send an email if there are no current deals
• Marks deals as seen after the email has been sent

References

Could use SendGrid this time around to send emails
https://github.com/sendgrid/sendgrid-go

As a developer, I want API endpoints, so that I can feed information to a future front-end.

Acceptance criteria

• Subscribe endpoint
• Unsubscribe endpoint
• Confirmation endpoint
• Endpoint to get deals from the last 24 or 48 hours

Tasks

• #11 email confirmation feature
• #12 unsubscribe feature
• #13 subscribe feature

References

• https://semaphoreci.com/community/tutorials/building-and-testing-a-rest-api-in-go-with-gorilla-mux-and-postgresql
• https://pace.dev/blog/2018/05/09/how-I-write-http-services-after-eight-years.html
• https://github.com/ardanlabs/service-training
• https://learning-cloud-native-go.github.io/docs/a.overview/

As a user, I want more filtering options on the web frontend, so that I can see more relevant deals.

References

Do not limit to top 50 deals in the last 48 hours:

• Allow users to select the time range (e.g. last month, last N weeks, last N days)
• Endless scrolling, but do not return deals with negative scores
• Do the same for the Trending forum category

Scan Go code with gosec

References

https://github.com/securego/gosec

As a user, I want to around what time of the year does a certain keyword come up more, so that can analyze when a certain deal might happen.

References

When searching for a keyword, display on a timeline when the keyword appears the most. We can see when a certain recurs more.

As a user, I want a link to unsubscribe, so that I can unsubscribe if ever I am not interested anymore.

Acceptance criteria

• Every newsletter should include a link to unsubscribe in the footer
• The link would look something like https://deals.gordon-pn.com/unsubscribe/aebafcacecf7fa16a68f6b26b0abfcee (or use parameters)
• When clicked, search the database for the same hash and remove the row (1 click unsubscribe)
• Show a page with success then return to main page after timeout
• If not found, just return success to the user (prevent unethical users)

References

As a user, I want a subscription form, so that I can subscribe to the newsletter.

Acceptance criteria

• When a user subscribes through the site, an email should be dispatched to that email
• Captcha to submit
• The page changes to tell the user that an email has been sent and that they need to confirm
• The form only takes a name and an email (do proper sanitizing and validation!)
• A row is added to the database with confirmed set to false and an email md5 hash (need to add these columns)

References

Acceptance criteria

References

https://github.com/leemunroe/responsive-html-email-template
https://mjml.io/documentation/

As a user, I want a better filtering algorithm, so that I receive the pertinent notifications.

References

Currently, the algorithm is using an arbitrary factor to multiply by to determine if it is a hot deal.

Might be better to use an nth percentile to filter by.

As a developer, I want a Docker configuration, so that the service can easily be deployed.

Acceptance criteria:

• Docker-compose, and Dockerfile

As a user, I want to be notified about deals on the home page, so that I don't need to visit the home page manually or potentially miss a deal.

References

There exists an RSS feed we can parse that are already split by items. Each of these items can be posted to the Slack workspace and the actual thread can be posted as a reply in thread to avoid click through.

https://www.redflagdeals.com/rss/deals.php?city=montreal

As a developer, I want a scraper service, so that the data is always up-to-date.

Acceptance criteria:

• Must be an automated service, where it requires no user interaction to run
• Health checks, for monitoring.
• Inserts and updates to a PostgreSQL DB
• Deployable as a Docker container
• Proper logging for observability

Tasks

• #3 Docker container
• #4 PostgreSQL

As a user, I want to be notified of trending deals, so that I don't miss a deal.

References

https://forums.redflagdeals.com/hot-deals-f9/trending/

Scrape 3-5 pages of this sub forum and store them in a separate table. Adjust the notifier to check this new table as well.

If stored in a separate table, there will be a lot of duplicated information. Use foreign keys.

Acceptance criteria

• Run build
• Run tests
• Deploy

Acceptance criteria

References

https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/build-an-html-email-template-from-scratch--webdesign-12770
https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/creating-a-simple-responsive-html-email--webdesign-12978
https://mjml.io/documentation/

As a user, I want to be able to select a lower or higher threshold, in order to receive more or less emails.

Acceptance criteria

• Cache api requests to deals endpoint up to an hour

References

As a user, I want website, so that browse.

Acceptance criteria

• Show hot deals from the last 24 or 48 hours
• Subscription form

Tasks

References

• https://nextjs.org/learn/basics/create-nextjs-app
• https://steveholgado.com/nginx-for-nextjs/

As an engineer, I want to write my own rising/trending algorithm, so that I can learn more about it those algorithms.

Won't be a simple problem!

References

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-make-a-trending-algorithm-684031c9eb

As a developer, I want a PostgreSQL instance, so that I can persist data.

Acceptance criteria:

• Include init script to create the tables
• Separate superuser and non-superuser accounts
• Insert item if doesn't exist, and update if exists, without changing "seen" status

Notes

Use a date format for the struct that will be compatible with the DB without much modification.