A web app for users to upload and transcribe audio files into text. Built using the Spring framework and utilizing AWS S3, EC2, RDS, EB, and Transcribe.

Just show me the app!

I started this project to further expand on what I have learned about web app development and database management. It has 3 primary goals:

1. Utilize AWS resources in a Spring app and gain familiarity with their services
2. Obtain initial exposure to deployment with Docker
3. Gain experience with more complex MySQL functions

• User accounts and authentication
• Transcription and storage of user-uploaded audio files
• Authenticated, expiring links to user audio files
• Monthly usage limits
• Text file downloads of transcripts

1. Make UI more user-friendly (error pages, failure messages)
2. Add unit tests

For the most part, the project has gone as expected. As I already had some CRUD app experience, most of the difficulty came from getting the different services (S3, RDS, etc.) connected correctly. I had no experience with them prior to this, and it has given me a much better understanding of why AWS and other cloud services can be so valuable.

Matching my previous experience, the greatest difficulty came when transitioning from a local build to a remote server. I kept getting 502 Bad Gateway errors when deploying my raw Spring app to Elastic Beanstock. This ultimately motivated me to deploy the app in a Docker container, which seemed to deploy without issue. I now understand why Docker has been growing in popularity these last few years.