Quizlet Coalition Screenshot

The Idea

I was peeved with the difficulty of finding high quality quizlets for my classes, especially when dealing with teachers with common names (i.e. Smith). Quizlet’s own search engine was typically pretty decent, but I was always looking for some more advanced searching tools that were better implemented than Quizlet’s classes feature. I decided to venture into building my own app.

The Features (or planned features)

  • Attractive 2-side homepage
  • Signup page, complete with a web scraping system to fetch additional information about the study set from Quizlet’s site
  • A search engine with advanced filters for teachers, classes, schools, and assignments
  • A publically accessable API
  • Advertisement implementation

The tech stack

Frontend:

  • HTML
  • JavaScript
  • CSS

Backend:

  • PHP
  • Python (BeautifulSoup)
  • MySQL
  • DigitalOcean Droplet

What happened

After working hard on Quizlet Coalition (QC) for a few weeks, I set off to begin marketing. After a few lazy reddit posts, I had acquired 3 returning users and about 30 hits on the website. Reasonably satisfied with the performance of my reddit posts, I continued to some more careful and targeted marketing which yieled a gigantic zero on all metrics. After several more weeks of working on the tech, I had nothing to show for it. With the cloud VM costing me money with aboslutely no return, I made the decision to shut down the project.

It was an interesting project to work on. It was my first real exploration into building a web crawler, and I did not yet know about any of the super cool frameworks that make web scraping easier (like puppeteer), but I learned about parsing DOM on the backend and extracting further information from headers and other clues passed to the browser.

Although I cannot take full credit for the design of QC, I am proud of the work done on it. It was my first exploration into the CSS flexbox system, which was daunting at the time but after a project of real-world use, I discovered how powerful it is and how much it can simplify the process of building a responsive, modern website.

I learned so much more than just flexbox and some design skills, and unfortunately my “learning opportunities” resulted in so much technical debt that, even if I was able to get this project off the ground, it would not have been a success as its instability would have destroyed the ux before any users could really experience the app. For starters, I did not use any kind of version control (GitHub is now a standard on all my projects), instead I opted to live edit in a simple DigitalOcean droplet over SSH, meaning anything I changed would change in production instantly, with absolutely no infrastructure in place for testing or QA. I also overcomplicated the project by integrating python AND PHP on the backend, passing information back and forth over a command shell with no security provisions in place.

Additionally, when I made this I did not konw any frameworks (like React). While on small projects this is of trivial importance, if I ever wanted this project to scale I would have to rewrite the entire site to switch to a framework like React driven by an API rather than server-side PHP rendered HTML.

When I ultimately shut down this project several years ago, I knew none of this. I attributed the technical failure to my choice of tech stack, and the commercial failure to my lack of marketing effort and competency. I decided to stop using PHP because of this project. Although there is aboslutely nothing wrong with PHP, I switched to node.js (express and recently Next.js), and have simply never looked back.

GitHub

jackcrane/quizlet_coalition