agotalk.com

For about six years I developed, ran and used agotalk in schools myself. You could say that's where I became a real full-stack developer.

I never marketed it. Yet technically it was massive.

agotalk.com could completely replace the school website and at the same time serve as a portal for teachers, students and parents to organise the school day.

For instance, teachers could collaborate on lesson plans, timetables and break supervision schedules.

Every teacher had a daily overview on their dashboard, with notes on the lessons and supervision duties — printable, too. For example, I always kept a printed copy on me.

After my first long-running project (poet-3), this time I wanted to prioritise clean code and software quality. I had seen how classic "feature-on-feature" chaos can hit its limits and bring an entire project to a standstill. That was an important lesson back then, and I wanted to learn from it. So I chose the powerful Symfony framework.

In the following six years I have come to know the Symfony framework well. I read the documentation at least twice, cover to cover. The community's blog posts kept me company back then, and I soaked up everything I could to make my platform better.