db-web-app

In 2022 I developed a prototype web application for creating and managing research projects and their associated data. The goal was to make something that small-scale research groups could easily deploy for managing their data. The idea is that these groups often have limited funding and don’t have access to people like database admins. It had several working features:

• The ability to design custom databases using a heavily constrained interface for people with little to no database experience.
• User accounts and a permissions system to control what resources people can access and change.
• A data history for data auditing and recovery.
• File uploads
• Some other things I might be forgetting

During the process of making it, I created some YouTube videos to document it:

• Proof of Concept 1
• Proof of Concept 2
• Proof of Concept 3
• First Walk Through

Technically, everything worked. However, the entire process was a new learning experience for me, and by the end, I realized there were some things I wanted to revisit and modify. Some of these changes proved to be overly complicated and involved, becoming too difficult to implement due to the need for broader, system-wide changes. At this point, the project is effectively abandoned in its current form, but since then, I’ve continued to work on web app development for specific projects. My current plan is to take what I’ve learned from these various experiences and restart this project from the ground up. I also have plans to create tools related to this. One is an R package for interfacing directly with the web app, for which I have already done some initial prototyping. Another is a smartphone app for data entry to the web app.