OH OkamiH

Web portal + CMS for high school event (2014)

In my high school, there was a decades-old tradition of 3 months long Olympic games, organized by junior (3rd grade) students for the rest of the school. It consisted of many different games and events. When the time for me and my peers to organize came, I volunteered to take care of the Olympics website where announcements and results are placed. This was usually handled by WordPress websites in the previous years, but I found that lame. I wanted to build the real thing from scratch - and I mean really from scratch, as a brief look at frameworks like Laravel or Symfony gave me an impression, that they are unnecessarily complicated and hard to customize (yes, I was very naive).

Fortunately, I was aware that this is not an easy feat for an inexperienced programmer, so I started sometime in May or June (the games were to start in late September). I didn't enjoy as much sun and fresh air as I was supposed to during that summer break, as I was fully immersed in this task, looking at Eclipse IDE most of the time. As you can tell from the screenshot, UI/UX design were not my strong suit (and still aren't), but I finished the project in time (including some gimmicks like user avatars, nested comment replies, polls, and live chatbox). The website successfully worked for the intended purposes (aside from few bugs, like page sometimes crashing right before submitting long article - sorry about that). This was the first time I felt like a real programmer and it was awesome. It also made me realize that PHP might not be the greatest language ever (mysqli_totally_real_escape_string), although I heard it has improved quite a bit since then.

Lessons learned: How to build a dynamic web page with a register/login system, simple CMS for publishing, editing and deleting articles, comment system, polls, etc. Also, frameworks are actually really useful and can save you a ton of time.