Revving up Raspberry PI

During the past weekend, I've embarked towards setting up a raspberry pi for my computing needs. While setting up an angular based e-commerce store that utilizes SAP Hybris YAAS (which is finally getting matured), I encountered couple of interesting things that I thought I'd share.

My setup was Raspberry Pi 3 (which has an onboard wifi and bluetooth device) and a LAN cable that would connect with a laptop. As this was close to a bare-bones setup, I encountered a couple of problems initially, related with connectivity and interface.

I started by flashing Raspbian OS and then attempted to connect via SSH. However, by default the DHCP ensured that I was not able to ping due to lack of proper IP address, let alone connect with the device. On my WiFi router, the assigned IP was reflected in the interface.
Upon connecting via SSH, I updated /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf to set the WiFi username and password. After connecting, first setup the static IP over LAN and then setup node.js and required libraries for the demonstration.

Another thing I'd like to add would be the 'raspi-config' command that is a handy utility while using the PI and lets you do various things  - which I had not known initially, and was doing that manually.

raspi-config utility

Instead of simply using the storefront as a server mode, I plan to utilize this as an input device (probably with camera module) and setup it up as an input platform to be used as an IOT device for all that's worth.