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kovaciny.com

Private hand-coded forum site, active since 2005. I took over maintenance in 2013. This project gave me a lot of hands-on experience with full stack web development and debugging other people's code.

Development environment

The code base is about 1800 lines of PHP and Javascript. I brought the site under version control, separated development and production environments, and created a Gradle build script to automate Javascript linting and site deployment.

Code maintenance

As a real-world project, kovaciny.com gave me experience with some common Web issues:

  • time zone problems
  • cross browser differences
  • scaling for mobile
  • parsing error logs
  • changing hosts
  • Javascript namespaces
  • caching problems

It's also valuable experience to return to your own code several years later when you have to debug.

Features and improvements

  • Added indexes and rewrote queries to drop front page query time from 1.5 seconds to 0.3 seconds
  • Added full-text search with results highlighting:
    Full-text search screenshot
  • Show user stats with Google Charts API
  • Gradual refactoring with Promises and Ajax to make the site more responsive, creating some API endpoints, and making the Javascript more object-oriented.

This repo is not live. It's a snapshot pulled from the Mercurial repository, with security-related code removed.