Christmas break of 2015. I was at home enjoying a little break from school. With this little free time, I decided to start learning Laravel, a PHP development framework. Why? Well, the CuSTEMized website at the time was built on PHP with a bunch of poorly organized and hacked together scripts. It worked. But I knew it could be better. In order to make it better, we needed to build on what others have already created. We needed to move towards using a framework. We needed to learn something new.
None of us knew how to use Laravel. Heck. None of us had even worked with a development framework before. In the beginning, the learning curve was pretty high. We faced moments of doubt when we had to ask ourselves: was this worth it? If things aren’t broken why fix it? What if we were to have spent all this time learning Laravel and then not even use it for the website anyway? But we knew just because it isn’t broken, doesn’t mean it can’t be better. And even if we didn’t end up using Laravel, we would still have learned something. So those reasons were good enough to keep pushing forward.
Now, almost a year later, our volunteer development team is proud to finally present the next version of the CuSTEMized website built on Laravel.
It’s fun to look back and reflect on how much we didn’t know before. We moved to and set up a new server. We had to learn about security. We had to establish launch protocols. We didn’t know how to do any of this. But we needed to figure it out and so we did.
I’m so proud of us.
Sincerely,
Jean
My Scientific Name
