Hyun’s Dojo

Hyun’s Dojo is a social platform and animation portal for young amateur animators. I designed the entire website and built it with the then-popular forum software PhpBB at its core. This was the first major project I took on as a full stack web developer.

The frontend is founded on jQuery and CSS done “the hard way”. I had designed and developed all of the UI components using a very disorganized single CSS file. More advanced functionality was created through heavy use of jQuery plugins.

The backend for the parts that were not part of PhpBB was written in a single PHP file that switched on the passed action and returned some HTML or JSON. This pattern was something I had grown used to when first learning PHP by example. The difficulty of maintaining this as the project grew beyond the toy prototype stage was a major learning experience for me. As a result of this project, I began to learn more about code organization and backend architectures like REST.

This project’s structure reflects my knowledge at the time. I like to think about this project as a personal example of how both people and software grow over time. The website served multiple generations of animators and artists over its 12-year lifespan, many of whom are now industry professionals. It was closed in 2024 as the software became too outdated and much of the community had moved to Discord.

A new version of the website is currently in development under a different team.