Where do I start with this project?

[pilecarls8]

I am fairly new to programming. I am lightly familiar with python, html and css from courses I have done several years ago. Right now I am working my way through CS50 and really enjoying it.

I have an idea for a project I want to develop full stack by myself. I would like to know if you think I will be able to figure it out by myself after CS50, or if i should look for more training before starting. Also If you have any recommendations on anything that could help me, please do help.

Project:

A web application for organizational scheduling and organization. The user would be the manager of a company. They would input all of their employees and current projects. They would be able to assign the projects to certain/groups of employees. The manager would then be able to make a daily/weekly/monthly schedule by selecting only the project. The application would know which employees are involved and schedule them accordingly. The app would also alert the manager if they called an employee to two different meetings at the same time without realizing.

A later iteration of this app would allow the employees to log in and see their personalized schedule for the day/week/month, rather than searching through the full company schedule.

I am sure there is software very similar to this already. I want to do this as a personal development project regardless.

Right now I am thinking about python and a framework like django for the back end. And obviously html/css for the front end. Is it essential that I learn javascript for the front end too? These ideas of how to implement it are purely because I don't know any better, so please give me suggestions.

Thank you!

[segfaultdev]

Right now I am thinking about python and a framework like django for the back end. And obviously html/css for the front end. Is it essential that I learn javascript for the front end too?

I'm not an expert on web developing, but every website I have made uses JavaScript for the front end, and that is what I would recommend using, but I think you can use PHP for front end too. Also, you could use other languages for the back end, if you want.

These ideas of how to implement it are purely because I don't know any better, so please give me suggestions.

You could use a MySQL or any other kind of database, with information about the users, the employees, the projects, etc. Then for things like assigning projects to employees you can store some kind of identifier of either of those to the other.

[bzt]

I am fairly new to programming. I am lightly familiar with python, html and css from courses I have done several years ago. Right now I am working my way through CS50 and really enjoying it.

Please don't get this the wrong way, but your experience is definitely inadequate for OS development. See Required Knowledge.

A web application for organizational scheduling and organization.

Hmmm, doesn't sound like an OS at all. Are you sure you have posted this question on the right forum? You might have better luck with stackexchange IMHO.

Cheers,
bzt

[nullplan]

Hmmm, doesn't sound like an OS at all.

Well, this is the "General Programming" category, in the "Everything Else" section. Meaning it is specifically not about operating systems.

I'm not an expert on web developing, but every website I have made uses JavaScript for the front end, and that is what I would recommend using, but I think you can use PHP for front end too. Also, you could use other languages for the back end, if you want.

You can make do without JavaScript, and whether you have your sites generated by PHP, Perl, or even C (with CGI) doesn't really matter. More important at the start is a plan for how you can get what you want. You want a web app that saves data persistently, so that sort of hints at the need for a database. But before you roll out your SQL schema, think about how this all should come together. What do the pages look like? What pages exist, and how do they interact? You have to plan this stuff out. Once you have that, writing a program to generate the HTML is basically the easy part.

Maybe foregoing JavaScript for the moment is easier, if only because this way you only have to think about two layers of source code (PHP/Perl/whatever generating HTML, which then is displayed) rather than three (JavaScript at the end of it all). Mind you, I also don't do web dev professionally.

[bloodline]

I built a project/resource scheduler to support a matrix working environment a few years ago... the database side of it is very difficult to get right (lots of transaction and relationships), I had to go through quite a few design iterations before I had something even remotely useful from a data structure point of view.

I really hate SQL databases

I would suggest a much more straightforward project, to bring your skills up!