Building Yarncom: From 0 to 22 Passing Integration Tests in 6 Days 🚀

Building a production-ready API from scratch is a rite of passage for every backend engineer. For my AltSchool Africa exam, I spent the last week building Yarncom — a secure, community-driven blogging engine. Here is a breakdown of the architecture, the logic, and the environment "ghosts" I had to bust to get to a green terminal. 1. The Architecture: MVC and State Logic To keep the system maintainable, I implemented a strict Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. Models : Defined with Mongoose to handle complex schemas, including an Author reference that links Blogs to Users. Controllers : The "brains" of the engine, managing the data flow and handling asynchronous handshakes with MongoDB. State Machine : Articles transition between draft and published states. I implemented security guards to ensure drafts remain private while published content hits the public feed. Automation with Mongoose Hooks One of the most satisfying features was building an automated Reading Time Algorithm. Using