Responsible hunting system

An acquaintance asked me to help them with making hunting responsible, so I obliged.

More information

In the modern times, hunters actually help out even the populations of wild animals, so that they don't do damage to the flora. In the winter, they provide food for the animals to help them better weather the cold and I've personally helped clearing a few beaver dams that were in danger of flooding the surrounding areas.

However, when it comes to hunting, it's actually important to do that properly as well. An acquaintance reached out to me and wanted some assistance in doing that, by developing a system that'd both allow keeping track of how many animals have been hunted, as well as would allow experts to add comments explaining how to do that better in the future.

What I did

With this in mind, and some hardware that was available, I set out to create the full solution for them. It didn't have to be very modern looking, but needed to have an easy to use UI and a simple codebase that would be easy for someone else to maintain as well. For that, I used the Lumen framework, back when the older versions of Laravel were comparatively more heavyweight. I also integrated the display of Mapbox for keeping track of where hunting took place.

What I learnt

Personally, it was an experience that showed to me that even comparatively dated tech stacks can still do good in the world. However, updating things to newer versions has never been particularly easy in regards to PHP and this was a similar case as well. Either way, the performance was good enough and overall I'm satisfied with the results so far.