From the Ground Up: Developing Project Edge with Code

When we first started Project Edge, I knew we needed a strong online presence. Wanting to create a seamless platform and user experience, I spearheaded the development of our organization using one thing: code.

The first task was developing the website. Having taught myself web development only a few months prior, I was going in fresh. I wanted to develop a minimal yet functional website; with this goal in mind, I continued reinforcing my knowledge in website creation while I planned. After a long three months, I deployed the first finished version of our website. The website itself was developed using a plethora of libraries: mainly React.js and Tailwind CSS. React.js is a library that streamlines the development of user interfaces and single page applications (SPAs). Tailwind CSS is a framework for CSS that quite literally revolutionizes the design process of web development. Virtually everything that is visually aesthetic on our website is thanks to Tailwind CSS.

After a few successful months of operations at Project Edge, I decided to implement a blog where our leadership team could talk about upcoming events, meaningful experiences, and anything else they wanted to discuss. At this point, I was much more experienced with web development. This time, I used a library called Next.js because it’s much more friendly for websites that rely on server-side rendering. Of course, I also used the life-changing Tailwind CSS to handle design and visual elements. The result was a clean and elegant blog site that we could use to document our organizational endeavors.

Some other features I’ve helped implement within these websites are Calendly, our sign-up system, and live chat, which you can interact with on the bottom right of our main website using the chat icon. Aside from websites, I help with any and all tech-related aspects of the organization, including social media, data management, as well as serving as a computer science and STEM instructor.

To finish off this blog, I’d like to give a huge shoutout to Vercel, the platform that hosts our websites. For one, it’s free (very student friendly). For another, it makes deployment and production that much easier.

Links:

Project Edge Website: https://project-edge.org/

Project Edge Blog: https://blog.project-edge.org/

React.js: https://reactjs.org/

Tailwind CSS: https://tailwindcss.com/

Next.js: https://nextjs.org/

Calendly: https://calendly.com/

Vercel: https://vercel.com/