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!
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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
This is the beauty of the Web that I came here to see.
Tripods are still online?!?!? Now I wonder if mine are still there :)
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.
This makes me feel so many nostalgic emotions. Boss.
I miss frames
It's so vintage!
I love minimal design :D
hahaha YES! If you were to describe this design with just one word it would definitely be minimalistic :D
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 ✨🙌
🤣
I accidentally hit wappalyser chrome extension button, it literally said "No technologies detected." xD
No technologies were used in the making of this website XDDD
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.
Also it has a cute splash screen:
I miss doing desktop apps a lot.
What about building Electron Desktop apps? These days you might even be able to replicate most of the functionality in MacOS classic...
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.
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
I've been getting into React-Native recently myself. What was your biggest road-block to getting started?
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.
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.
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
Spielplan Beachturniere Ismaning
spielplanismaning
Spielplan - System für die Beachturniere in Ismaning
Dokumentation
Hier findest du die Dokumentation
Build Status
CI-Tool
Travis
Installation
Tests
Server Start
Build
Lokal über gulp
oder für Serve aus dem dist
Alternativ
Workflow
Callback hell 😈 I know that feel :(
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.
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 :)
Was this for the freecodecamp.org curriculum?
Yep :)
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
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. 😢
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...
I built my first app in x86 16-bit assembly when the OS looked like this:
or at best like this:
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 =)
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.
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 :-[
My first published app... Something like 20 years ago..?
I wrote an application to allow an infrared remote to control playback of music on Winamp. Today, we can just talk to computers... But imagine two decades ago being able to control a computer from across the room. This was still the age of dialup computers. Almost nobody had a home network at all, wifi wasn't really a thing yet... But despite this, I gave people a tool to wirelessly control their media experiences!
I hesitate to even call it an app, as there is zero CRUD or backend of any kind. But it's the first thing I built in React, after which I started using React a whole lot more. The site is an interactive exploration of state-level tax data: statetaxindex.org
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.
After my first year of programming (at school), I created a 100% voice-drive children's game with .NET tech. It's the pinnacle of UI excellence 😜
Here's an old youtube video of me demoing it 🤷♂️
I didn't know you could do speech recognition back then. Very interesting 👍
Most tech we come across is usually actually pretty old - just wrapped up in a prettier package 😂
Right!! 😄🎉
The actual app doesn't even look too bad. But the code. Oh boy, the code. I switched the repo to private just so that people can't have a look at it
My first web app would have been a university assignment from a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. As for my first Android app: Apocalypse Cow. Made primarily to learn some Java and OO programming, and to have a go at making a game.