I have a simple college football pick ’em contest with a group of friends I’ve been running through email & a very formula/condition-based spreadsheet for years. It’s always been a dream of mine to transition that into a self-owned, web-based solution. But admittedly, I’m a little (... a lot...) rusty.
Background: I grew up in the MySpace era, so I know my fair share of basic HTML. Unfortunately, I’m an old and it was prior to CSS becoming widespread, so I have little to no experience with that. I have academic experience with C++ and some JavaScript but that knowledge is roughly 20 years old at this point. The good news is that my day job is living and breathing analytics through SQL and SAS so my mental state is still in a logic-based, programming (ish) field.
Vision…
I have a simple college football pick ’em contest with a group of friends I’ve been running through email & a very formula/condition-based spreadsheet for years. It’s always been a dream of mine to transition that into a self-owned, web-based solution. But admittedly, I’m a little (... a lot...) rusty.
Background: I grew up in the MySpace era, so I know my fair share of basic HTML. Unfortunately, I’m an old and it was prior to CSS becoming widespread, so I have little to no experience with that. I have academic experience with C++ and some JavaScript but that knowledge is roughly 20 years old at this point. The good news is that my day job is living and breathing analytics through SQL and SAS so my mental state is still in a logic-based, programming (ish) field.
Vision: I’d love to come up with a solution that allowed people to create usernames/passwords, access forms for submitting game picks, and very rudimentary stats and visuals that are updated each week.
Any ideas on what my best starting options are? I’m not against going the SquareSpace/Wix/WordPress route but I’m unfamiliar with how flexible they are with options like managing users & data storage without dipping your toes into the commercial/small business products. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I love the idea of taking on the project and constructing it myself but don’t have a good idea for where to start in today’s game, since my last “from scratch” website was a .html text file saved in Notepad. I’m guessing that’s not how things are done these days. In an older reddit post, I saw theodinproject.com mentioned. If that’s a solid starting place, I’d love to hear some anecdotes from anyone who’s used it and whether JavaScript or Ruby on Rails (which I know nothing about) is the more suitable path. I’m also not against contracting it out to a freelance coder but I would be flying completely blind on what something like that may cost. At the end of the day, this is a fun, side-project hobby, not a money-making venture I’d look to dump thousands of dollars in to.
I appreciate any tips and advice you’ve got for me!