My new side-project
By Jay Marriner, 07/09/2022
Since getting settled in at work; I have been looking at different side projects to partake in. Whilst I still have my android game to work on; that project often requires waiting multiple days for approval from google before we can properly test our updates in a native android environment. This led me to wanting to create a website that would actually hold utility beyond just myself. My wanting to create something useful helpfully coincided with a friend asking me to make him a portfolio website which sparked the idea to make a portfolio creation site!

Initial thoughts

Starting off with the idea I knew I wanted to target the site toward people who can't code meaning it needed to be simplistic, have a nice front-end and be as simple as possible to get up and running. For this I made a prototype admin panel that will be used as inspiration for the final project.

The next task was to make a nice front-end for the actual portfolio page, this wasn't too tough as I had already created pretty much what I was going for with my main website. This may need some refactoring in the final project to ensure the website is well optimised but for now it works great.

A final task for myself was creating directories and files and learning about server file access permissions. This was something I had messed around with in the past but never fully experimented with. The issue I had initially was that I was using a friends webserver and I did not have the correct permissions in order to create writable and readable directories for other users. This meant finally teaching myself how to setup my own webserver.

Web Server

As mentioned above; a web server is something I have put off doing for a long while however I found the experience of setting up the server and installing a LAMP Stack quite enjoyable. Despite some headaches here and there I found success in making the site and now have a functioning webserver where I can test projects that require higher level permissions and potentially use it to scale public websites.

Moving forward

Now that I have got the server up and running; I will be starting work on the website! I'm excited to get it up and running and hopefully hold some actual utility for people. I have decided to open-source the majority of the code base eventually (most likely once the site is in a stable manor). I have also decided to (at least at launch) keep the site ad free and subscription free so it can be enjoyed by all people whether they be students, graduates or professionals. I will most likely have a donation page that will help with server costs as the site hopefully scales upwards! This is a project I think could really help a lot of people and I look forward to seeing where it goes.