BEMED - Zero Waste Montenegro

BEMED is a full-stack web application built to help government institutions in Montenegro track and reduce their consumption of single-use plastics — part of a broader Zero Waste initiative supported by the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP).

Background

This project was developed in collaboration with international students from Hogeschool VIVES (Belgium), Zealand – Sjællands Erhvervsakademi (Denmark), and Hogeschool Inholland (Netherlands). The programme combined several weeks of remote teamwork with a final in-person sprint at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, making cross-timezone coordination and clear API contracts essential from day one.

What I Built

The application provides institutions with a structured way to register, categorise, and monitor expenses tied to single-use plastic items. The stack was chosen to keep the backend and frontend decoupled and independently deployable:

• Express.js REST API written in TypeScript, exposing endpoints for expense registration and reporting
• Vue single-page application consuming the API and rendering dashboards for institution staff
• MySQL relational database storing expense records, categories, and user accounts
• Keycloak handling authentication and role-based access control, keeping auth logic out of application code
• Docker Compose setup for consistent local development and straightforward deployment

Technical Highlights

• Stateless API design with JWT tokens issued by Keycloak, enabling easy horizontal scaling
• Role separation between regular staff (data entry) and administrators (reporting and configuration)
• Containerised services mean the entire stack — API, frontend, database, and Keycloak — spins up with a single docker compose up
• International collaboration required clear OpenAPI-style documentation so team members across three countries could integrate against the API without constant back-and-forth