This post is mostly a transcript of this YouTube video of mine, in case you prefer video content. Plus there’s a pretty cool intro there :)

Background

At the age of 30, I enrolled in an e-commerce program (actually something like a 3-year bachelor degree) at an IT school in my country, because I wanted to get a job in that industry, and while I did pass all my exams, I still didn’t technically graduate, because I didn’t do the final graduation project assignment… thingy…

There’s several reasons for that, one of which is lack of ideas for projects that could keep me interested, as well as the motivation to do it at all, since I managed to find a job, even without it.

But I think I may have thought of something finally.

Now before I go deeper into this, let me first make it clear that this just a beginner-level school project, I still consider myself a beginner, and it’s basically a plain old e-commerce project, so don’t expect anything cool and groundbreaking. The only thing about it that could potentially be interesting is the theme.

And that theme is, as you likely figured out - the Epic Games Store.

What is The Epic Games Store?

For those of you who are not familiar with it, the Epic Games Store is a pretty controversial online PC video games store that has been getting a lot of attention on the internet - and not the good kind - mainly because of their questionable business practices, but also, partly because of the fact that their store website is very poor, lacking even some of the most basic features that are common on pretty much every e-commerce website, like advanced search and filtering.

So, what is this about?

To cut the long story… Slightly less long…
I was listening to something about doogfooding and great projects being created out of necessity, and I thought - what if I tried to remake the Epic Store, but incorporate some of these features that are lacking currently?

In the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson, how hard can it be?

Sounds like a potentially interesting project to do… Not only is it a dev project (as opposed to writing a long dry theoretical paper or something like that), but it’s also related to one of my other interests - gaming!

And one other cool thing about it - I can use it as an opportunity to push myself to learn something new and improve my skills. I know in theory I could be learning stuff on my own anytime, at home, after work, in the evenings… But trust me, you get better results when you give yourself some deadlines and a specific goal with certain requirements…

How can you help?

For those of you who would like to contribute… I basically have two things you could help with:

1.

If you have thoughts on what features you would like to see in the Epic Store, or if you know of some good articles or blog posts about the features lacking from it, let me know! I want to have a good number of ideas to choose from, even though I would have to prioritize… But more on that in a future update. (Of course, we are talking only about things that can run in a browser).

2.

For my fellow developers… Any suggestions on technologies or frameworks or services I could use to make this as simple as possible, would be much appreciated.
Bear in mind that I’m only a relatively new front-end developer, and the school requires us to do a full-stack project. Not only is back-end not my thing, I only had some very basic education in SQL and some really old C# stuff, but I’m not very advanced with the front-end stuff either, for example I’ve never used a JS framework of any kind (yes, we do exist).

Wrap it up, dude!

So I might need to learn a bunch of new things for this. But if you have any ideas on how can I make it easier for me, maybe use some kind of a cloud backend solution, like Firebase or something like that… Or if I should learn, say, React for front-end… Please let me know. You can leave comments here or on any of the social media I use (Linktree in my profile).

Oh, and if you’re wondering, the very last deadline for all this is… about a year-ish. But if we can do it faster, that’ll be great.

Also, it just occurred to me, even if this doesn’t get approved by my school… It seems like a good learning project to do anyway… I just hope there’s enough time for it all.

And that’s pretty much it for now. I’ll try to keep you updated. I plan to use YouTube and blog posts for the major updates, and if you’re interested in some less-major, more day-to-day, or week-to-week stuff, there’s my Instagram account.
I also sometimes (when there’s time) post mini- column-styled posts about the industry, or the process of getting the job, maybe Q&As, etc; so, feel free to follow, and I hope to see you around! Take care!