FairGig

The brief

Build a platform connecting freelancers with clients. We called ours FairGig. Deliver a working MVP and present it live to a judging panel. Not a mockup — something that runs.

What I owned

I led the backend. That meant designing the relational schema and the relationships between users, profiles and listings, building the authentication flow with proper password hashing and session handling, and writing the server-side logic connecting the frontend to the database.

We worked in a real Agile rhythm throughout — daily stand-ups, sprint planning, peer code review, and Git-based version control. Not because it was required, but because with a deadline that hard you need to know what everyone is doing.

The hour before judging

An hour before we presented, we found a bug in the authentication flow. The one feature every single user would touch first.

We caught it by testing manually, under pressure, because we had no process that would have caught it earlier. We fixed it, presented, and placed second.

That bug is the reason I take testing seriously now. Not as something you get to if there's time left — as part of building the thing at all.

What I'd do differently

• Write tests for the auth flow first, before the features that depend on it
• Set up a staging environment rather than testing against local only
• Document the schema as it was built, not after