One Seat Open

One Seat Open, an invitation system for limited seating events.

History

This project primarily came from a personal frustration in hosting my own game nights. Most invitation systems I researched were open ended (no wait list support) or were so chock full of ads that I could barely navigate them. At the same time I was also looking for a project with which to learn front end development as I have been mostly focused on backed development. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity to build my own service.

Development

After researching several frontend frameworks I eventually settled on Vue.js with the Vuetify plugin for several reasons. Vue.js was established enough to have good tutorials, training videos and a robust presence on Stack Overflow for questions. It also had an easy ramp up and it didn’t originate from Facebook. (Petty, I know, but I have a personal distain of Facebook).

Status

In November of 2019 I finished the initial version of and started to host a couple of game nights on the system. It was working pretty well but then the pandemic hit and I halted my home games, which halted my motiviation for working on the service. So it sat mostly idle until recently when I decided to start working on it again.

I initially wrote this service in Kotlin while I was doing a lot of Kotlin development at work. After changing companies I switched to primarily using Go for my work development and haven’t really done a lot of Kotlin development since then.

I still really like the Kotlin language, but it is much easier to develop in a language you are currently using. Plus, I often use my personal projects as a way to explore different solutions to technical challenges at work, so aligning the two can be useful.

All that said, I’ve decided to rewrite the project completely in Go with Vue3, but still using the Vuetify plugin. However, I’ve decided to keep this code base closed source for the time being. I’m not 100% sure yet what I want to do with it once/if I finish it and want to keep my options open for now.