The Home Library

The Home Library was developed as a collaborative Dev Academy project inspired by a simple idea: many people own books that sit unused on their shelves, while others would happily borrow and read them. The platform aimed to unlock these personal libraries by allowing users to list books, discover titles nearby, manage loans, and build community through local book sharing. My role combined feature development with acting as Git Lead, helping coordinate collaboration and maintain a stable development workflow across the team. The application was built with React on the frontend, Express as the API layer, and Supabase handling authentication and data storage. One of the project's strengths was its backend design, separating concerns between authentication, routing, business logic, and data persistence. Book availability was intentionally modelled separately from loan records, allowing the system to represent real-world borrowing more accurately while preventing inconsistent states. The project also incorporated rich bibliographic metadata such as ISBNs and edition identifiers to improve matching between individual copies and published works. Working on a larger team introduced challenges that simply don't exist in solo projects. Merge conflicts, deployment issues, and coordinating multiple contributors required just as much attention as writing code. The experience strengthened my understanding of collaborative Git workflows, CRUD application architecture, API design, and software testing. More importantly, it reinforced that successful software development depends as much on communication, planning, and shared ownership as it does on technical implementation.