Bookshare

This was the first useful project that I had ever completed back when I was still in college.

I like reading books, and so do lots of people from my college campus. The college library had a limited collection of books when it came to non-technical books. So I came up with:

A book discovery service within a trusted circle of people.

This is how it worked:

• A web portal where anyone from the campus can share what books they have.
• Anyone can view all the books that are available to be borrowed.
• Profiles were verified to be from the campus only.
• In order to get access to any book, you needed to create an account, which will give you the access of book owner's contact number.

I had never built a full-featured web application before. One my friends knew PHP, so I started learning PHP. I spent days learning PHP, and MySQL for the database.

I deployed the app on a free shared hosting platform Hostinger, and marketed it to the people I knew. 75+ students did create an account on the platform, but not all shared their books. 30+ users shared 100+ books on the platform.

People did use the platform to connect with others and share books with each other. But there was no way to know that for me! I did not give a way to record that kind of activity! There was no analytics set up as well!

But how was the code?

The code was full of bad practices.

PHP is very easy to start with. But give it to a beginner with no experience and he'll probably write the most un-maintainable code you can imagine. That's what I did.

This is why the code was bad:

• Spaghetti code with no thought put into organizing the code
• No separation of views and the logic
• Business logic and database queries spread across multiple views
• Inefficient database queries with no caching whatsoever
• No way to track changes in database structure
• Security issues
• No easy way to modify features

As the first real project used by real people, it gave me the confident I needed to build new things!