For CSC 437: Dynamic Web Dev, we were tasked with creating a simple website for a purpose of our choosing. I'm pretty dissatisfied with Goodreads as a way to track the books you've read, so I decided to make a website where you could log all of the books you've read, and also keep track of authors, genres, and the years your books were published in.

The years category is largely because I think the chronological context in which a book was written is often an important part of understanding its message. I think being able to see what books were written in the same year is interesting.

Anyways, the website was initially built with raw HTML/CSS/JS, as a way to get ourselves familiar with those tools on their own, without the help of frameworks. This was to show us how difficult some tasks can be using just those tools, and why frameworks save a lot of time.

Afterwards, we rewrote our websites using Lit, and used a MongoDB database to store our entities. I liked the class a lot because it actually taught us fundamental web development concepts, and really broadened my perception of why the internet exists the way it does. I think this class is also the first one that really opened my eyes to how important a solid project structure is.

Frankly, I had a lot of hopes for this project that didn't really pan out due to time constraints, and because I didn't really want to keep working in Lit. It's not hosted online and the database is deactivated due to inactivity, but maybe one day I will revisit this project and bring it back to life.

I think what I would like to eventually do is add a section to shayandaijavad.com that allows me to keep track of my books, instead of creating a separate website altogether.