In my first post, I mention that I'm working on a reading management system. So, in this post, I'll tell you why and how this begins.

Glossary

Before I start telling the project's story, I'd like to present a glossary of terms relevant to the story.

• Webcomic: A comic created for the web.
• Webtoons: These are a subtype of webcomics that originated in Korea witch format is vertical, thinking and prioritizing their consumption on mobile devices.
• Light novel: a genre of Japanese literature.

The beginning

My college paused classes momentarily at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks to this, I got back into a past hobby, reading webtoons, then most of my reading tracking was on Goodreads.

Webtoons, webcomics, and Goodreads

I appreciated the UX of the website and Android app but found my experience tracking webtoons a little poor. At this point, I had already followed and dropped some webcomics out of frustration to not recalling where I had stopped reading after some days of not checking the webpage or app where I read them. The situation was better in Webtoon, but this was only better for their webtoons and if said webtoon updates frequently. I tried logging them on Goodreads but fail doing so. Nonetheless, I change to reading mostly only Webtoon's webtoons.

A new challenger approaches… Bookwalker and J-Novel Club

Around April, I met Bookwalker as a user. I was avid to read more content, and thanks to a promotion from J-Novel Club, I started using Bookwalker.

Furthermore, I read Invaders of the Rokujouma?!, one of my favorite light novels. I began reading the LN because I believed I enjoyed the anime version. Also, because of the promotion, I read Seirei Gensouki, Demon King Daimaou, and Otherside Picnic, another favorite light novel. Thankfully, these were in the database of Goodreads, so I tracked them there.

Another semester, another objective

After some time, the university decided to resume classes virtually, and the semester ended, but my passion for reading didn't waver.

In the fall semester of 2021, I took two courses relevant to this story, one called Management of software projects and the other Technologies for building software. In the latter course, I tried to make the first iteration of what now is the Reading software system as the course project. For the former, I used it as experience since I was the team leader for the project.

The failure and the beginning of the end

This project, about which I was passionate, was my first experience as a team leader for a team of software engineers that were also my fellow college students. It was challenging because I was the user, stakeholder, team leader, and software engineer building it. Reflecting on it, my inability to separate my different roles in it was one of the reasons for the downfall of the project. Also, I lack the strictness and temple to make my teammates work timely and correctly on the project.

There was no significant advance at the end of the semester. So we failed the course. I was sad and frustrated at my inability to make the project work, so I forgot about it.

I'll leave the story here and continue in another post.