Roundnet France

From player to developer

Roundnet France is by far my largest side project concerning web development. Coming out of my training at O’Clock with fullstack skills and a particular appetite for React, I chose to learn the framework everyone was talking about: Next JS (v10 at this point).

At the same time, I was working in collaboration with the newly created French Roundnet Federation, whose goal is to promote the sport on a national scale. Passionate player and long time member of the first French associations, the old heavy and dated Wix site was collapsing from all sides.

Thus, it is quite naturally, with the conjunction of the new acquired competences and a real need that I proposed to remake their whole site, as a win-win: the federation gains a website, I gain a project to scale up my skills and to experiment with a semi-professional context: a customer, some needs, technical solutions to be brought. All that, in a tight time to prepare the first world championships, in September 2022.

The timeline

Between mid December and mid January 2022, the date planned for the launch of a first publishable version of the website, I started the adventure of creating a complete and partly manageable website (list of clubs, list of members, user permissions, administration interface) with all the stakes that this involves. With each new project, no matter its scale, I set out to learn and discover new tools, libraries and frameworks. I was able to develop my curiosity and my skills on a certain number of central functionalities of a web application:

  • In addition to the React/NextJS environment, I used the MUI (v5) component library which seemed to me to be ideal to be able to create, in such a short time, a classic user interface easily identifiable by users,
  • for security and authentication, I used Next-Auth, with a provider to help me, Google,
  • the data are stored in a MongoDB Atlas database,
  • files can’t be stored in a serverless environment, so I used Firebase Storage (in its v9 SDK),
  • client side API calls use SWR, whose caching and data mutability tools are very useful,
  • Joi for data validation,
  • Sendgrid for sending mails.

Each of these technologies was as important for the good functioning of the site as essential in my understanding of web development, documentations, debugging, use of community resources. Thanks to the efforts of my interlocutors within the federation, with whom we established clear specifications and short agile iteration steps, I was able to develop my skills with a real size project.

The site Roundnet France is online since mid-January, deployed on Vercel, respecting the deadlines initially proposed. It has a complete administration interface which allows the members of the federation to adjust some essential contents of the site by themselves, in a completely autonomous way. I continue to work on this project that I am passionate about in order to bring as many features as possible and make it the reference not only in France, but also in Europe.