Web Lab
Ideas – Concepts – Products
The EV Web Lab is where we show off the side projects we’ve created over the years. A common aspect of being a programmer is tinkering around with concepts and ideas in our free time. We often try out new tools and frameworks, and the best way to learn those is to create something new. Other times, we might think of an idea or have someone mention an idea to us, and we put together a proof-of-concept. And even other times, we just have an idea for something that we actually want to build for our own personal use. This is a collection of the most significant of these Lab items that we have completed and made available to the public to use.
Featured Projects
A series of one-off scripts were put together to create the Printshop concept. The first script was to generate images with a comic book effect as a way of making a family photo album of our favorite vacations. The next concept was creating PDFs of “letter banners” after it was determined we needed more holiday decor. Finally, after campaign posters were needed for Student Council, a script was made to customize and generate campaign signs. Then they were all put together in one place.
The site utilizes the Laravel framework, and uses the Browsershot Laravel package, which utilizes the Puppeteer npm package to generate the final artwork via a Laravel Blade template that is saved as an image or PDF. The comic strips image manipulation is handled with ImageMagick. The site is supported by a MySQL database for storing font and background image options.
Finding a homepage that suited our needs after iGoogle shutdown years ago was always a challenge. There were some attempted clones at it, but none that completely did what we missed. This homepage was built custom to our needs, but laid out in the same style as iGoogle. The big improvement is that each block wasn’t one specific feed, but rather a grouping of RSS feeds with a specific theme (e.g. Local News, National News, Sports, etc). View the demo or create your own personalized homepage.
This site was built using the Laravel framework, with the SimplePie PHP library to parse the RSS feeds. The front end is generated with Laravel Blade templates. The content is stored in a MySQL database. This was built from scratch by us.
Taking the concept of the common party game, “What If?” this web game was made as the a project to hone ReactJS with Redux and web socket integrations. It was designed to be played with a group either in the same room or around the world, or you can play solo rounds.
The frontend is built with ReactJS, using Typescript, but is powered on the backend by an API built with Laravel. The frontend also utilizes Pusher for websocket integration for realtime feedback to other users. There is also an Android app that was compiled using the Cordova framework. This was also built entirely from scratch by us.
Not everything we do is for the grown-ups. This was something that grew out of the need to keep the kids engaged with school work during the COVID-19 school shutdown. Finding difficulty in getting kids to do schoolwork on the home computer that was “for games,” the Sight Words Challenge was built in a weekend to give a gamification of the list of high-frequency words that young elementary school kids were practicing everyday in their classroom.
This site was built in just vanilla Javascript and jQuery, with Bootstrap providing the CSS structure. The list of words is one JSON file, and the javascript parses that to retrieve the subset of words for the given round. Everything was built from scratch by us, with the list of words imported from the PDF provided to the students by the school.
*Update 8/6/2023 – Now powered by VueJS, removing jQuery entirely, as a weekend crash-course in VueJS.
This is a passion project, our latest side project. PolicyCrowdsource will be a civic engagement platform that empowers citizens, experts, and policymakers to collaboratively shape public policy. Inspired by participatory models like Change.org, the site enables users to propose new ideas, debate existing initiatives, and crowdsource feedback to refine impactful, evidence-based solutions. Through transparent discussion, measurable community support, and partnerships with institutions, PolicyCrowdsource bridges the gap between public input and policy action—making democratic participation more accessible, data-driven, and effective.
Everything has been developed from scratch by us, with the help of Claude Code. This was not vibe coding, but rather the foray into using AI as a tool. The frontend is built with VueJS, and the backend is powered by Laravel. The frontend consists of a custom-developed component libray for quick page building through reusable components. It utilizes Horizon for queue management, and Reverb for broadcasting.