Getting back into development

My time in the Australian Army is coming to a close and as this happens I need to start focussing more and more on what I wish to do once I get out. I’ve been taking this time to develop my portfolio a little and start to rehash some old code to get it into a workable state.

My first port of call was an ERP system that I first wrote a couple of years ago. I’ve always had a keen interest in business management and I wanted to write a tool that could do all the nifty things like manage inventory, manage customers’ accounts, generate both online and PDF versions of invoices so that they could be automatically emailed to a client and automatic generation of purchase orders, or at least the ability to generate a list of products that needed ordering. And that is exactly what I managed to come up with. I had grandiose plans of having this system authenticate from a separate OAuth login server so that users would only need one account to be able to use this and any other tool I wrote and I had that in a workable state, however some of the underlying code I was relying on has since been deprecated and so I removed the OAuth option.

In case you haven’t viewed my portfolio page, all of this code is actually live for a demo at the moment at http://erp.testbed.ml.

Since I’ve started working on old code I’m ashamed at how some of it was left and I want to fix up a lot of things, but then I’ll be disappearing down that rabbit hole and who knows where that would leave me. A lot of things need new layouts and since I put down the code a new version of Laravel has been released and the entire codebase should be ported over.

I’m looking forward to my next project though, once the next great idea hits me.