What is a website without a portfolio?

Not very attractive, I think. Or perhaps attractive, but then you really only have your own site to show what you can do.

But yes, I don't have such a large portfolio yet. Just some study projects, four of them, and of course my own site where you are now. And there was the problem: two of the four were no longer live, as they say. The training taught me how to put this live, or deploy, via a platform called Heroku. But like many services these days, Heroku has become fully paid. So I removed my projects from there a year ago and therefore the last two study projects no longer had a live website.

Then you might think: "Yes, and then you put them somewhere else or you pay for them." I don't mind paying as such, but I think it's a bit of a shame for study projects that are only looked at very sporadically. Deploy somewhere else, good idea! So go to Vercel, you might think. But that's not how it works, because projects that are now three years old and have not been updated cannot simply be put live.

So I delved into that old code again, which at first makes you think: "My goodness, what did this do again?" Now my last study project was more of a puzzle to get the database, which luckily I still had, and the static files (images, JavaScript and styling) to run properly. And then you can immediately test how well you wrote your own documentation three years ago, because if you don't understand how to set up an AWS S3 bucket (for the images) again based on your documentation, then you haven't documented properly. 

Now I had documented well, but that last project, which was also the graduation project, was so extensive. Then you have to think: is it worth the time to make it work 100% again? No, I didn't think so. So I made some adjustments here and there so that it worked via Vercel and, if you want, you can get a good idea of ​​that project via the site that is live again: Postfly Jouw Online Drukkerij.

And then my penultimate project of the course, which was a recipe manager. Well, it was completely outdated, so I had to do quite a bit of tinkering with it, but that was easy to do with a little internet help here and there. Unfortunately I wasn't smart enough to make a backup of the database, so there are now only three recipes on it. Oh well, there are worse things.
But updating this project gave me some feeling for another Python package that I hadn't used in a while: Flask. I won't bore you with all the development terms in this blog.

But internet help, what do I mean by that? Well, other developers explaining projects via YouTube and also ChatGPT. There has been a lot of buzz about ChatGPT lately. You can think what you want about it. Personally, I don't think it will completely replace developers, but that it can be more of a useful programming aid if you know how to use it. Anyway, that applies just as well to a search engine like Google. If you don't use the right search terms, you'll get a lot of useless results.

Well, the conclusion of this blog: all my study projects are now live again. You can find them on my portfolio.

And if you think: "Oh well, that looks pretty good and I'm ready for a new website or an update to my website," then just contact me via my contact page.