Before Spring Boot, before any internship, there was the holiday planner. It was my first ever project in uni, and we built it as a group.
The idea came from something we all found annoying. When you plan a trip, you end up on three different sites: one for flights, one for hotels, one for movie tickets. So we thought, why not put all three in one place?
That’s what we built, a website that brings hotels, movies, and flights together. The stack was just HTML and SQL, nothing fancy.
My part was the planning, the system design, and the UI, and I helped with some of the coding too. I worked out how the pages would flow, how the data would be organised, and how everything would look.
The hardest part was that nobody was there to guide us. No mentor, no step-by-step tutorial, just us and Google. Connecting HTML with SQL was the trickiest bit. It was our first project, so we had no idea how a webpage even talks to a database. We got stuck, searched, tried things, broke things, and eventually it worked.
Looking back, the project wasn’t pretty. But it taught me how to work in a team, figure things out without being told how, and finish something that actually runs. It’s also where I realised I wanted to build things for a living.
More stories from my uni days coming soon.
Top comments (1)
The part about having no mentor and just figuring it out with Google is the most valuable thing you learned — that's the actual skill. Tutorials teach you syntax; being stuck and unblocking yourself teaches you how to be a developer.
Connecting HTML to SQL for the first time is genuinely confusing because nobody explains the request/response cycle until you've already banged your head against it.
Looking back, what would you tell your past self about how to approach that connection?