Proof point → Every claim on this site traces back here: December 2017, a student auction app, and a one-line README honest enough to say it wasn’t production ready. Ten years later, I know exactly what production ready means - because I’ve been closing that gap ever since.

🩻 Problem

The university brief: build a complete auction platform for artwork, in a team, in a term. The real problem, in hindsight: learn what complete costs.

🔨 Solution

Artatawe - a JavaFX desktop auction house:

Architecture Overview

  1. Domain model - User, Artwork with Painting and Sculpture subclasses, Bid, BiddingHistory: inheritance and composition learned on a real problem.
  2. Thirteen GUI controllers, nine FXML views - login, sign-up, browsing, artwork details, bidding history, place-artwork, user profiles - plus a custom draw-your-own-avatar canvas, and a Christmas-lights background betraying the December deadline.
  3. Flat-file persistence and time utilities - pre-database, by design of the brief.
  4. Team reality - 116 commits, multiple contributors, NetBeans and Eclipse configs committed (every teammate’s IDE), and full generated Javadoc for every class - documentation discipline at age one-of-the-decade.

📜 Philosophy

Learn by building something whole: GUI, domain, persistence, docs. And tell the truth about it - the entire README is one line: “Definitely not production ready.” That sentence set the bar everything since has chased.

🎓 Key learnings

  • OOP fundamentals under deadline: inheritance hierarchies, separating controllers from domain.
  • Git collaboration before it was comfortable - merge conflicts across IDEs and teammates.
  • The first taste of the gap between “it works” and “it ships” - the gap that defines the next ten years of this portfolio, ending at richiedagenius.com’s 89 test files.

📈 Output & impact

  • The decade anchor: a continuous, documented line from this repo (2017) to production-grade platforms (2026), all on one GitHub account.

🌍 Why this matters

Talent & Education. This is the control sample: what a well-designed university project actually produces, and how far a learner can travel from it in a decade. Anyone designing training for new builders should remember being one - I have the receipts.

🚀 Hire me

Want a builder who knows exactly how far fundamentals travel? Let’s talk → · See also: CS Foundations · The thesis