What I've Learned: BoilerSell

by Hunter Thornsberry

Two weeks ago I had an idea, fellow students of mine needed a marketplace to sell books, tickets, and other things online to other students within the university. I set out to build a website to accomplish just that.

I had built websites before but I wanted this to be built (relatively) from scratch, the only two things I did not code myself was the beginning CSS and the basic HTML layout of the page, everything else was raw code.

I started off wanting to use a fancy framework like AngularJS to make my site "current" but I realized that time was a factor in this website and I had to scrap that idea and build the website with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP.

Therein lies the issue, I had no Javascript experience, and little PHP experience. So I had to learn how to use those, mainly PHP as Javascript is still 100% new to me.

When starting off from scratch and going farther into build an "web app" than I have ever ventured I needed the right tools from the job.

  • Sublime Text 2 - for all of my coding, its easy to use and has great tools. Maybe switching to Atom.

  • Filezilla - To push all of my code to the test server (as there is no production server yet)

  • GitHub Private Repo for version control of all of my code (has saved me more than once)

Overall as the project progressed and grew I realized that I what I wanted to do and what was feasible did not match up. I did not want to spend three months build an awesome website only to have it flop. I need to get a product out there and then support it as it grows. I also learned the importance of version control with GitHub. Overall the project is still in the "pre-launch" stage but I plan on launching by the end of the month.