BakeSoc is the baking society I'm a member of at the University of Birmingham. Every couple of weeks they host a bake (with two sessions), where members get to socialise with each other and make the bake for that week.
However, they can only host up to 40 students per session so members must register for the bake on a first come, first served basis.
This is done by creating a post on the society's Facebook page and members comment on it if they want to be added onto the list for the session.
As you can probably tell, this is not the most elegant solution and can cause the committee unnecessary stress. They need to:
- manually add members to the list for both sessions (80 people)
- add them in a chronological order
- ensure there are no duplicates
- create a waiting list for each session
- remove members from the list if they can no longer attend
- contact the next person on the waiting list to see if they can attend
- create a register for each session
- etc...
Being a computer scientist, I saw this problem and it was glaringly obvious that an online registration system could easily alleviate this problem.
I did some research into online registration systems, such as Eventbrite and Bookwhen but found that the free versions of these platforms had limitations and the premium accounts are expensive for a small university society.
This is when I decided to create a custom system for the society.
I knew that I wanted to create the system using Python as it is the language I am most familiar with and has an extensive array of libraries that could come in handy.
After some further research for a Python framework to use, I was either going to use Django or Flask.
Ultimately, I decided on Django. Even though there was a greater learning curve for using it, it provided more out of the box features (such as an admin protal) that I knew would be useful for the project.
My brother is a software engineer by trade and knows React extensively, which is why I decided to partner with him for the project.
He could focus on the front-end, based off my designs, while I could write the backend.
After a couple of months, we created the BakeSoc site.
It is a registration system that solves all those problems listed above:
Whilst designing the UI for the site, I went onto the society's Facebook page to download their logo to include within the site. I was very disappointed to discover what the current logo looked like and it would've been embarassing for someone with an interest in graphic design to use it.
So I completely redesigned the logo and used this instead.
I contacted them about this and they are now using this as their logo, which will be featured on BakeSoc merch like their aprons for years to come.