Short little update on this blog! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
The semester just ended, and it was quite a substantial one with two major projects—each containing two subjects' worth of grades. Our final grades and whether we'd pass or not depended entirely on the final project outputs we would make and present.
Let me dive into the nitty-gritty and explore these two projects real quick:
Glyzier - Our Application Development and Industry Elective project, which focuses on React, is an e-commerce platform for artists where they can sell their artwork. Built with Spring Boot, Java, React, PostgreSQL, and Supabase, this full-stack application features secure JWT authentication and a simplified single-server architecture. The frontend is built with React 19.1.1 and Vite 7.1.7, while the backend uses Spring Boot 3.5.6 and Java 17. Maven builds the React app and copies it to Spring Boot's static folder, eliminating CORS complexity with a single JAR deployment on Render.
GameVault - For our Information Management 2 course, this is a digital game store selling game keys. Built with Django, Python, PostgreSQL (Supabase), and vanilla HTML/CSS/JavaScript, it features role-based access control for users, sellers, and administrators. The application includes a shopping cart, checkout system, digital game key delivery via email, user profile management, and an admin dashboard with analytics. It uses function-based views, Django ORM, and session-based authentication, all deployed on Render.
Both of these projects were mainly spearheaded by me. I hate to say it, but I was the only one in our respective groups to take initiative to create the projects—while not necessarily leading my groups, they barely made contributions except for some who really tried to help even though they were busy.
But besides that point, I'm quite happy with the outcome of these projects. We passed the criteria well for both, and I'd say it was a pretty good effort by me, if I say so myself. I didn't feel pressured by time because I spread out my workload over the semester—not unlike last semester where we only did the project a week prior. These two projects were different; I set aside time and put effort into making them come to life, following the teacher's guidelines and pointers well.
Other than that, the semester has been a chill ride mostly, and nothing to complain about really.
Now that the holidays are here, I expect to go back to working. As of right now, my future looks a little bit uncertain due to some family problems, but it's alright—I have a special someone who holds me dearly and wishes me the very best, and that has been keeping me going.
This is just a short update on what I accomplished this quarter of the year. I'm proud of my creations as well—you can see them on this website and check them out!
That's about it!