I feel like a very stupid clever person.

Let me explain. Last year I did my final year at university. Clearly that didn’t go too well given I’m still here. Last year one of the major contributing factors in me decided to skip the year and start again was my final year project got out of hand. It was too big and I focused so hard on building it I would have never got all the documentation done and would have almost certainly failed it, despite having a fairly in depth and working product. As I think I have explained before, my system was called SORT (Scouts Online Records Tool) and it was for my scout group in particular but really, for any group. The idea was to get all their records online for the leaders to access in one place. It also contained a messaging system allowing them to e-mail parents and parents contact them.

Now this sounds a lot like a webmail to me, so being me I went and built one. I built an integrated webmail system that handled connecting to an IMAP account, getting headers, reading if they were new and un-read, handling importance flags, handling the replying, forwarding, the replying to all, the sending of attachments as well as the downloading and viewing of received attachments.

This is all a lot more complicated than it sounds. Almost every e-mail client sends e-mails in slightly different ways, and yet more ways depending on if you have them set to use HTML etc. Then yet more ways if you send an attachment and yet more ways after that if you send more than one attachment. In short, making your e-mail client(webmail in my case) work with every other one is very very complicated.

Being me, I went and did it. I built this system. It worked. It worked with every e-mail client I could find to test. It worked with attachments and without, it supported HTML e-mails and plain text. It was all pretty smart stuff. It took me just over a week in total.

Today I had a meeting with my project leader about my new final year project. I was pinning down the structure of my project as I’m not a great fan of repeating mistakes. I recounted this story to him. He then explained that a year or so ago he was the tutor for a masters student who did a whole project on just solving the getting attachments, plain text and HTML issues I had with all e-mail clients. He did a project on something I solved in 2-3 days.

In short, less than one sixth of the deliverable I designed which I did in 2 or 3 days was someone’s whole masters project.

I feel like a very stupid clever person.