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Ali Spittel
Ali Spittel

Posted on • Updated on

Show off your first app!

I recently remembered the first web app that I built. It was part of my senior thesis in college -- I thought that adding a way to visualize the data I was working with would make the project more interactive and it would be able to reach more people.

It's far from perfect, and the version online is the second design and I also went through a big code refactor at some point.

I had also been writing code professionally as a software engineer for around a year when I wrote this (and was a computer science teaching assistant for a year before that), but it was just data science/analysis code instead of code for the web.

I learned a lot with the project, and a lot of that knowledge has carried over to work even recently!

The app is here: http://politicaldiscussion.herokuapp.com/! You can see the about page for more about it, and the source code is also linked in the footer!

What was your first app? Is it still online? Show it off below in the comments!

Top comments (99)

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vintharas profile image
Jaime González García

Behold! The first website I built was when I was 12ish and managed a Age of Empires/Kings clan. I can't believe it is still there after 20+ years:

(Brace yourselves)

(No. Really. Brace yourself)

tnt-lord.tripod.com/mainpage1.htm

Curiously, the next time I did any web development was 15 years later xD

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rpalo profile image
Ryan Palo

This is the beauty of the Web that I came here to see.

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chrisrhymes profile image
C.S. Rhymes

I remember using yahoo geo cities to build a site many years ago. I would have been very happy at the time if it looked that good as that.

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therealkevinard profile image
Kevin Ard

Tripods are still online?!?!? Now I wonder if mine are still there :)

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jamesmh profile image
James Hickey

This makes me feel so many nostalgic emotions. Boss.

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m0ntassar profile image
Montassar JDIDI

I accidentally hit wappalyser chrome extension button, it literally said "No technologies detected." xD

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vintharas profile image
Jaime González García

No technologies were used in the making of this website XDDD

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biros profile image
Boris Jamot ✊ /

It's so vintage!
I love minimal design :D

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vintharas profile image
Jaime González García

hahaha YES! If you were to describe this design with just one word it would definitely be minimalistic :D

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aimerib profile image
Aimeri Baddouh

A true hipster, ahead of the curve in the minimalism movement! He Marie Kondo-ed (or Kondomari) his whole website and disposed of anything that didn't spark joy ✨🙌

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vintharas profile image
Jaime González García

🤣

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ld00d profile image
Brian Lampe

I miss frames

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soapdog profile image
Andre Garzia

Behold! A client for Blogger. It allowed you to post to your blogs from the comfort of your desktop. I built this for MacOS Classic back in the day.

Blogger client app running on MacOS Classic

Also it has a cute splash screen:

iBlog splash screen

I miss doing desktop apps a lot.

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aimerib profile image
Aimeri Baddouh

What about building Electron Desktop apps? These days you might even be able to replicate most of the functionality in MacOS classic...

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soapdog profile image
Andre Garzia

To be honest, I don't like Electron. You end up with multiple chrome engines running on the same machine wasting resources. I love web technologies but I'd rather use something less wasteful on the desktop. Thanks a lot for the reply though. I wish all those electron apps were sharing a runtime.

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edkahara profile image
Edward Njoroge • Edited

I recently built my first mobile app. I decided to learn react native by building a simple chess clock (for android). If you have an android phone, you can download the apk and check out the repo

home
settings

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aimerib profile image
Aimeri Baddouh

I've been getting into React-Native recently myself. What was your biggest road-block to getting started?

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edkahara profile image
Edward Njoroge

My biggest road block was probably wasting time with video tutorials. I knew what I wanted to build before I started react native. The tutorials weren't helpful so as soon as I decided to just learn as I was building it, things went smoothly.

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aimerib profile image
Aimeri Baddouh

That's funny, because I struggle with a lot of that too. Often I'll watch video tutorials thinking they will help me as long as I follow along, but what I've been quickly realizing is that: 1. They often give me a false sense of security in thinking that I know more than I do since I'm familiar with how code should look like, and 2. that I enjoy watching those more as entertainment than as a learning tool.
I do find a lot of value in written material though.

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Bernhard Wittmann • Edited

My first real app was a tournament and game schedule administration for sport events of my local sports club. It was done with the MEAN stack and especially the backend contains a lot of spaghetti code and is the pure callback hell 😣 However I'm still proud of it ☺️ Check it out below

BerniWittmann / spielplanismaning

Spielplan Beachturniere Ismaning

spielplanismaning

GitHub version Code Climate Test Coverage

Spielplan - System für die Beachturniere in Ismaning

Dokumentation

Hier findest du die Dokumentation

Build Status

Umgebung Build-Status
Testumgebung Build Status
Produktionsumgebung Build Status

CI-Tool

Travis

Installation

npm install && bower install

Tests

gulp test

Server Start

Build

gulp build

Lokal über gulp

gulp serve

oder für Serve aus dem dist

gulp serve:dist

Alternativ

npm start

Workflow

  1. Neuen Branch von develop erstellen
  2. Änderungen in mehreren kleinen Commits auf Branch
  3. gulp versioning task ausführen
  4. push to origin (inkl. tags)
  5. Pull-Request erstellen
  6. Tests und Code-Analyse laufen automatisch. Pull-Request kann nur bei erfolgreichen Tests und nach Approval gemergt werden. Möglichst auch alle Code-Climate Issues beheben.
  7. Pull-Request mergen

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lkreimann profile image
Lea Reimann 🦄

Callback hell 😈 I know that feel :(

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pranavpandey profile image
Pranav Pandey • Edited

I developed a Stopwatch for Sony Small Apps API for Android in 2013. It is still live on Google Play with over 85K downloads.

Later, I made most of the code open source in the form of a library which is available on GitHub.

Stopwatch Small App

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Darkø Tasevski

puritanic.github.io/Tribute-page/

I've left this as a reminder how far have I come on my journey :) Not my first first project, as I wrote a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts for online browser games, but the first project after I've decided that I want to work as a developer for real :)

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aimerib profile image
Aimeri Baddouh

Was this for the freecodecamp.org curriculum?

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puritanic profile image
Darkø Tasevski

Yep :)

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aimerib profile image
Aimeri Baddouh

I went through a lot of their course in my early days! It was such a good experience, and so empowering! It felt really nostalgic to see the tribute page again!
I've kept mine for posterity too! slothcrew.com/tribute/index.html

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Gift Egwuenu

My first was for my dissertation for my first degree. I built a human rights NGO website with just a little knowledge of HTML, CSS and JS. My only regret is I wasn't aware of Git and Github so I've lost the files. 😢

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detunized profile image
Dmitry Yakimenko

I built my first app in x86 16-bit assembly when the OS looked like this:

Imgur

or at best like this:

Imgur

and had no multitasking. I built a resident (or TSR) text mode screenshot grabber one could invoke by a keypress and it would save a screen buffer to the floppy. Ancient stuff =)

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Ben Sinclair

My first TSR (that I let other people get their hands on) decremented the clock counter twice per tick. That meant that the Windows 3 screensaver clock appeared to run backwards. This was very clever, to my juvenile brain.

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detunized profile image
Dmitry Yakimenko

Back in those days the viruses were so innocent. Like playing a tune every day at 5 o'clock or flashing red frame around the screen once in a while. Not like ransomware of today :-[

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Matthew Daly

The first actual web app I built solo was also my first solo professional web app. It was called Pagepooch and it was a price and page tracker - you'd submit a web page using a bookmarklet and it would either track the price of a product as it changed, or track changes to the page content. It was built with CodeIgniter 2 and had a companion Phonegap app.

It's no longer active but you can see it at web.archive.org/web/20130517174018...

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horus_sky profile image
Cedric W

One of the first sites I created was a one page site back in 2009. It showcased an internet puppet show call Tank Talk: The Shark and Ray Show, sponsored by The McWane Science Center in Alabama. Some of the shows are still on youtube: youtube.com/user/thesharkandrayshow

But it was just a simple one pager to display the youtube videos.

tank talk