OlyBet

OlyBet was one of my earliest freelance engineering projects shortly after completing Makers. A friend working within the business gave me and another recent Makers graduate an opportunity to contribute to a real commercial initiative and gain hands-on experience with a real client.

The problem was commercially relevant but focused. OlyBet consumed an RSS-style live feed containing sports event data - historical matches, currently active games, and upcoming fixtures. Raw feed data wasn't useful on its own, so the requirement was to explore how that information could be transformed into something visually understandable and interactively navigable for users.

The goal was a proof of concept: demonstrate how incoming event data could be mapped into intuitive categories and presented in a way that internal engineering teams could later productionise. This POC informed OlyBet's internal development work; it isn't directly visible on the live product at the URL above.

The project was intentionally lightweight, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to rapidly build an interactive frontend prototype without introducing unnecessary complexity.

The core work was consuming structured live event feed data and transforming it into meaningful frontend groupings - completed, live, and upcoming events - presented in a coherent interface that reflected the client's expectations. Because the deliverable was a POC rather than a production deployment, speed of iteration and clarity of implementation were prioritised over framework-heavy architecture.

An equally important part of the engagement was stakeholder collaboration. We worked directly with the client to understand expectations around layout, colours, conditional rendering, and categorisation logic, then iterated on feedback until the concept matched their needs.

The most valuable aspect of this project was less about technical complexity and more about the professional transition it represented. This was one of my first paid engineering engagements, which meant it was my first experience applying newly learned technical skills in a real client-facing commercial environment.

The biggest lesson was that software delivery is not simply about writing code - it's about interpreting business requirements, clarifying ambiguity, iterating on feedback, and delivering something that solves the actual client problem.

What I'm most proud of is that this opportunity helped bridge the gap between education and professional engineering. It provided early exposure to freelance client communication, technical delivery expectations, and the confidence that I could create commercial software outside of a structured training environment.