Veric

Veric was a two-person project I built during my time in codesters.club, a digital product development program I took as an elective. It was meant to be a platform to help high school students find short-term job opportunities.

But if I'm being for real — it was mostly me projecting. I was constantly running into dead ends trying to get hired anywhere, and everything felt like it was made for adults with polished CVs, not teens just starting out. So I built the thing I wish existed: imagine if GoWorkaBit and CVKeskus had a younger, simpler, more casual sibling built for students.

Originally, we called it Fu-hire... which sounded okay until you actually said it out loud (yeah — “F U hire”). The rebrand to Veric came fast.

Since the program (digital project development) was designed to mimic a real product team, I was assigned the role of CTO. Technically, I had a team — but only one person really contributed. I focused on the backend and infrastructure: user authentication with Flask, Airtable as a database, and way too much Jinja2 macro logic in the name of “modularity.”

At the time, I was deep in a React rabbit hole, so I tried to replicate component-style architecture in a templating engine that absolutely was not built for that.

And yeah — the code worked. But it wasn’t thoughtful. I buried everything under a pile of abstractions trying to be clever. It was my first time building something end-to-end: auth flows, forms, CRUD, user systems — all from scratch. But instead of building a product, I treated it like an architecture puzzle.

I didn’t think about layout. Didn’t even touch responsiveness. I was so busy abstracting templates that I forgot to actually design for the people using them.

That said, I had a blast.

It was the first time I built something structured, something with real users and a clear purpose. I got to flex and get humbled at the same time. Working with someone else was also eye-opening — my teammate caught bugs and edge cases I completely missed. That feedback loop made everything better.

If I could do it again, I’d chill on the abstraction and focus on clarity. Start from the UI. Think mobile-first. Keep things boring and maintainable. Write less clever code and more understandable code. Just build the thing people actually touch — not the scaffolding underneath it.

Veric never fully launched. We hit the 90:90 rule hard — the first 90% took 90% of the time, and the last 10% dragged forever. Eventually, we just moved on.

But honestly? I’m okay with that.

It wasn’t perfect. But it was real. And it reminded me why I like building things in the first place.