The Club

Many years ago, we all went to Oxted Secondary School in a little, posh town called Oxted, which resides in Surrey, England. This is where well met. Fast forward to late 2020, in the early mist and confusion of the Covid pandemic, upon a long discussion we all realised we were wannabe book worms. By then, I (Darrell) had just moved to Berlin and was rarely in the UK, meanwhile Hugo was about to move to Australia, and Seb and Josh had plans to travel the world. Perhaps influenced by the social isolation of Covid, we decided to form a book club primarily as a way of staying in contact. We never took it too seriously and with every online meeting, we spent 50% of the time talking about the book, and the other half catching up.

Nevertheless, we still scored each book and Josh took care of the book graphics which you can view in the book library. It was then a matter of discussion what the next book would be. By 2024 we had read and scored 12 books, and had no plans in stopping. However, this created a problem. We had all this data of scores and graphics but it was only stored on our whatsapp group. This made it a nightmare if we wanted to review scores from years ago. Hence, I came up with the idea of creating a website, so that anytime, any one of us could visit this site.

As I created a Fullstack application for this purpose, it meant anything was possible. For example, I could store the data as a json via a database platform and create my own API. With this API, I could manipulate the data however I saw fit, such as calculating our average rating, whether we read all the books and what were our best and most hated. I did just that, and you can view our stats, for example, here. Furthermore, I could add CRUD operations and user login, meaning we could rate the book and add another directly on the website.

This of course is just a small example of what is possible, and what I achieved so far on this website. We are always coming up with ideas and the more challenging, the better.
I am incredibly excited of what this could become!!

If you have any inquiries, please feel free to email me at: mrdarrellroberts@gmail.com.

To view the source code, here is the GitHub repo.