Web platform, Predictions
A Flemish soccer-prediction website that replaced paper ballots with accounts, digital entries, and automatic scoring.
The Grove Gok is a Flemish website where people can make predictions for the European Championship and the World Cup. The project was commissioned by my father and a friend of his, after they got annoyed by the manual labor involved in letting people submit paper ballots with their predictions.
Over time, the project grew into a full-fledged platform. It now offers account creation, digital hand-in of predictions, manual payment processing, and automatic score calculation.
Soccer championships are not a continuous traffic source. The site has to be trustworthy when a tournament starts, quiet when it ends, and ready again the next time. That rhythm forces you to write something you can pick back up, not something you only understand the week you shipped it.
Grove Gok was the first thing I built that other people actually depended on for a real-world ritual. Even though it was commissioned by family, it's used outside my social circle. And that taught me a lot about software development, from actual design work to usability, and from architectural design to code maintainability.