BES Online
An online platform hosting a treatment for Binge-eating disorders
Online platform offering a treatment for Binge-Eating Disorder (BED). The treatment was developed by the group of Prof. Dr. Simone Munsch of the University of Fribourg. The aim of the project was to bring it online to test its effectiveness on the Internet. The development was initially planned to take place over three months early 2016, although it was extended to March 2018. The platform has been used by more than 100 patients, with more than satisfactory clinical results.
More information about the treatment and its effects can be found here.
Technologically, BES-Online takes the form of a Laravel application, running on a classic LAMP architecture. For the frontend, Vue.js has been used on some recurring elements of the interface. From the end of 2017, Taiga became our project management tool. The GIT repository is hosted at BitBucket.
Lessons learned:
I took part in the initial discussions on the project (decisions on which technologies to adopt, how to implement certain functionalities, etc). I took on the role of "full stack developer" on my own for the whole project until it reached a sufficient degree of maturity.
On a technical level, my learning experience on this project mainly concerns the apprentissage of Laravel, as well as an update of my PHP skills. As a comment: Laravel is an excellent backend, but offered (version 5.1) inconsistent proposals for the frontend. I would gladly go back to a Laravel project, provided it is limited to a "RESTful" backend, coupled with a Jamstack application. As for PHP, the language clearly no longer deserves the opprobrium it suffered in the early 2000s. On a human level, this project was the opportunity to test the efficiency of SCRUM, even in a solo development with a single Product Owner. Productivity skyrocketed as soon as we held weekly meetings, using Taiga as a support for the followup.