Sorry for being incommunicado – there’s been a lot of change at Netflix and I really haven’t had the bandwidth to write since April.

My app is nearly ready for deployment to production!

I spent the better part of last week getting the user sign-up flow implemented and debugged. I had to adjust my implementation to account for my two sign up flows:

• Free monthly subscribers
• Paid monthly subscribers

The implementation I had deployed meant that both sets of users would land on the Stripe payment page instead of only the paid monthly subscribers.

It took me about two days to understand the problem before I could implement a working solution, which I’ll walk through now:

• When a user starts sign up, the first thing they have to do is create an account (handled with Google’s Firebase Auth library)
• Upon successful login, a callback in the auth flow is executed and determines where the sign up requested originated (handled by setting a query parameter provided by the sign-up button component).
• If the request originated from the free account option, my auth flow provisions the user (account settings) and stores a future entry in Stripe in case the user chooses to upgrade. Once that callback finishes executing, the user is redirected to their dashboard.
• If the request originated from the paid account option, the auth flow provisions the user and sends the user to the Stripe page for payment. Once payment succeeds, the user’s account is updated (on the backend) and they’re redirected to their dashboard.

With that buttoned up, I’ve began the work of scrubbing the site for two main buckets of work:

• Grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes
• Environment variables that need to be abstracted

As for deployment, I’ll be reusing some ElasticBeanstalk infrastructure I had deployed for my MVP. I’m targeting deployment to Production by the end of this month.

Once deployed, I’ll have to reactivate those MVP users and see if I can convert those folks onto the new platform.

Have a great week.

• Jonathan