Howdy, welcome to the first episode of Kortiku. My name is Shaquil Maria and I am a junior developer working my way through my bachelor degree in Information & Communication Technology. I was interested in technology since I was a little kid playing with hot wheels and remote controlled cars. I always used to disassemble them to see what was inside, and as I grew older and started messing with phones and computers I became more interested in how they function and the software that run on them.

During the different classes of my bachelor I learned different programming languages and different concepts, but I never actually made a complete application that I can say is production ready with that knowledge. At some point during my study, I started working as a part-time web developer at a local company and there I sharpened my skills of frontend development, design and JavaScript. That is when I decided that it was time to turn my know how into practical use. I started working on different small time projects like clones and todo apps, but then again they were not full projects that you can publish for everyday use.

So what is kortiku then? 🤔

Kortiku means short in my native language Papiamentu. I guess you can already imagine where this is going. Kortiku is a URL shortener that I developed in JavaScript with MongoDB as database and EJS as frontend templating engine. You can check it out here. While I was satisfied to have created something that is on a level that I think is respectable, it was still just a simple JavaScript project, nothing complex.

I decided to add more features to the project, like a link-in-profile (like Linktree). I thought: "the more complex the app, the more I can learn". Like the development process of a production-ready (an app that goes live) application and development methodologies. So I decided to refactor the codebase of the project and switch from JavaScript to PHP, more specifically the Laravel framework.

Why PHP?

Well, like I mentioned before, during my bachelor I learned a couple of languages. Java was the primary programming language of the study, but I also learned some PHP, JavaScript, Python, and Dart in order to create applications and projects for certain classes. Since I haven't used PHP in a while, this is the perfect opportunity to sharpen my skills in the language.

So.. What is this blog about?

This post is the first of many (hopefully). This first post is the introduction to the Kortiku series, where I will be building the application in public, so that I can hold myself accountable, and share things I learn along the way. This series will go about the actual development of the application and about methodologies and architecture patterns that I implement and learn about, like Test Driven Development and Scrum.

Thank you for reading this intro post, and hopefully you join me on this journey. If you have a project that you wanted to work on, mention it in the comment section below and let's support each other so we can all learn and finish our side projects.


If you have any experience with PHP and Laravel, what is something that you like about it and what should I pay extra attention to?

See you next time.👊🏿

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash