Go Eat BC

An Idea Before Its Time

In 2004, this was an app business that was WAY before it’s time. Today you call it UberEats or DoorDash. At the time, the mobile technology and business infrastructure weren’t ready to support the model. I mention it because it was the first time I wrote a complete content management platform from scratch which lead to making the jump from static websites for my entertainer friends, to dynamic web services for real businesses.

I built this from scratch in PHP 4, before I adopted Drupal as my go to content management framework. That means I built my own templating system, database abastraction layer, form management, etc. It certainly wasn’t a flexible system but I was solving problems that allowed us to manage content in a way familiar to modern users of something like Drupal or Wordpress.

This is where I first developed my Full Stack skills. I had worked with Linux for a while, as a good computer nerd from tail end of the 20th century. To get this project up and running I needed to learn to configure Apache and MySQL, so I could write the application in PHP. So there’s the LAMP stack. But of course, I was the sole dev on this project and we needed a front end, so include HTML, CSS and JS. This project really kicked off 20+ years of that and more.