Thoughts & Discussions.

Building the website was the easy part. Deploying it turned into a month-long lesson in old infrastructure, Node.js runtimes, reverse proxies, and shared hosting. Modern frameworks make deployment look effortless until you leave the platforms they were designed for.

I thought rebuilding my college's website would be an engineering problem. Build the frontend, connect the CMS, deploy, and move on. The reality was very different. This project taught me lessons about stakeholder management, SEO, scope creep, deployment, and why building software is often easier than aligning people.

Most church software focuses on administration. BYF started with a different goal: reducing friction for worship teams and youth ministries. This is the story of how a few recurring frustrations turned into a platform for planning, scheduling, collaboration, and engagement.