Ross Wintle

This is a historical note, really.

In May and June 2017, Sainsburys Supermarket teamed up with Lego to create a card-trading/collecting thing called "Create the World". It was a brilliant tie in and for about 6 weeks, anyone with a young person who shopped there would be talking about it, and cards were traded in playgrounds across the country.

I saw loads of people arranging swapsies by posting what they had on Facebook and thought: "There must be a better way!"

I was learning Laravel at the time and saw an opportunity to hone my coding skills.

And thus, https://swaptheworld.uk was created. It took about four or five hours, and mainly proved just how amazingly fast you can now:

* Spin up a new application
* Buy a domain
* Deploy the domain to cheap cloud hosting
* Add free HTTPS
* Iterate and deploy changes

Some of these things would have been expensive or complicated not long ago.

Rapid application development is truly with us.

Published: 16th Feb 2018