Alright, let’s talk about this little project I messed around with – “midshipman store”. I kinda just dove in, y’know? No grand plan, just saw something cool and thought, “Yeah, I can probably hack that together.”
First off, I started by trying to figure out what the heck I even needed. Like, what’s the bare minimum for a really basic online store? So, I scribbled down a list. It was something like:
- Gotta have a way to show off the stuff I’m selling, duh. Pictures, descriptions, the whole shebang.
- A shopping cart thingy. People gotta be able to toss stuff in before they buy it.
- Some kind of checkout process. Collecting addresses and payment info is important.
- And obviously, a way to actually handle the money. I looked into some payment gateways.
Next, I started sketching out the front end. Figuring out how the products would be displayed, how the cart would work when you add something to it, and what the checkout page would look like. A lot of this was just ripping off ideas from stores I liked and then trying to dumb them down. I used basic HTML, CSS. It was ugly, but it worked for now.
The backend was the real headache. I decided to go with a simple database to hold product information. I messed around with setting up the database schema, and then fiddled with some basic server-side scripting to pull that data out and send it to the frontend. Let’s just say there was a LOT of trial and error involved. I wrote some endpoints for the frontend to communicate with. It’s not pretty, but it does the job.
Checkout was next. I went with a third-party payment gateway. I copy-pasted a bunch of code from their docs into my site, and tweaked it until it didn’t explode. After all that, I did some basic testing: adding items to the cart, going through the checkout flow, and making sure payments actually went through. I messed up a few times, but eventually got there.
Lessons Learned:
- Planning actually helps. I started without a real plan, and it was a mess. I think next time I’ll make a diagram first.
- Security is important.
- Testing, testing, testing! Catching bugs early saves a ton of time and headache.
So yeah, that’s the “midshipman store” story. A janky, slapped-together project, but it was a fun way to learn a few things. I got my hands dirty and saw how everything connects. Now I know how much I don’t know.
