Web Development

I still remember my first time trying web development. I was in fifth grade, and I made some kind of tan-color abomination of a website teaching the basics of HTML and CSS. Afterwards, I made another basic website in my early teens, hosted on the same URL as a minecraft server I played on with my friends. I felt cool telling people I had my own website and showing them what I made. Life went on, and I didn't get a chance to re-visit web development till I was in university.

Once in uni, I found myself making websites for courses, with my first worthwhile one being the Computer Science Student Store, a full-stack LAMP website functioning as a simulated store for computer science students. I designed it to meet assignment criteria and get me a high grade, and I got that A+ I was after, but it's not something I'd consider worth showing off.

Fortunately, this portfolio gave me a chance to improve some of those skills. I based this portfolio on the CSStore, cleaned things up a lot, and made the design much more appealing. This was a good chance to work on my front-end design skills, and I was able to really improve my grasp of CSS by spending some time here and there working on and experimenting with the interface. Later, I rebuilt the portfolio using Eleventy, migrating away from PHP to a modern static site generator.

The next step for my web development journey came in the form of a take-home project I did while interviewing for a software developer internship. I was tasked with designing a Full-Stack Library Website capable of reading books from a database, sorting them by various means, and adding new books to the database. This was much simpler than the previous projects I've done, and only took me a few hours.

Building that library site gave me the urge to fully dive in and make a fully production-qualtiy full-stack website better than anything I've made so far. If I get the time, that's next on my to-do list.