This was the final project I did for a part of my course at university. Thankfully I had the freedom of choosing what I wanted to built, so I went with a photography social media for several reasons.
The main reason was that it fitted the task I had to complete for my course. Another reason was that at the time I had just started getting really interested in photography, so I wanted to make a website where I could share my photos. On top of all that this was the perfect opportunity for me to create my first production back-end.
During the development of this project i encountered several issues. The first major issue I encountered was creating a dynamic scroll feed. It was my first time trying to build something like this and on top of that I only had a couple days to do it. In the end I ended up going with a simple feed that shows the newest posts at the top. This feature is still a WIP so I haven't completely given up on it.
The other major issue was optimising the images. Since the target audience of this website was photographers I wanted to make sure that high resolution images could be kept high resolution when uploaded to it. To achieve this I had to go though several test phases, but in the end I learned a lot about optimising user generated content (images) in the case of a social media website.
Something else I wanted to point out was the design of the website. I used Tailwind CSS to develop the front-end due to time constraints. This allowed me to keep things really consistent and overall I'm really happy with how the website ended up looking.
Most of the things I learned from this project were back-end related. Some examples are, optimising and storing user uploaded images, handling of errors on back-end, deploying a Laravel back-end and more.
I also learned about storing user data in a database and the rists involved with it.
