Making good progress on this project, it seems that I'm able to move a lot faster now after having done so many side projects using essentially the same stack. I was able to get iron-session set up within a day (I had used it previously) and made good progress on the admin dashboard.

It's not been about two weeks since I started this project and I have both the main site and admin portal (mostly) functional now. The admin portal is shown in the video below:

Learnings

I am still getting used to the app router. A lot of the invalidating of server state is still a little confusing to me, but I've made good progress in terms of getting this project to this state. Between this project and work, I'm coming to realize when it comes to software engineering, organization is honestly one of the most important things in the modern day. Of course, there's a lot that can be done for optimization later on, but most problems come down to components being disorganized.

I think there are very few "difficult" problems in fullstack engineering nowadays since getting certain functions to run just .000000000001ms faster has hit a bit of a ceiling in terms of utility and sHaReHoLdEr VaLuE. But I'm quite excited to move on to the next part of this project, which involves some harder algorithms.

Next Steps

I haven't figured out a good algorithm for auto-matching yet, which will be an exciting problem to tackle (especially since I'm not using Claude).

Full to-do list (this is mostly for me since I think I'm the only person reading my own blog):

• request/gift application when clicking "join" on event
• based on session, allow adding characters/tags/editing profile
• stricter session management for admin page
• invite link generation in admin portal