Ranking App

A group of friends and I decided to do a blind seltzer tasting — originally envisioned as a bracket-style March Madness event that for practicality sake became a tiered scoring event where each seltzer was ranked on a matrix of criteria and a champion crowned. I quickly realized that a spreadsheet wasn't going to cut it for sharing the results. I wanted something I could text to the group and have them see a live, visual leaderboard that updated as we worked through the event. So I built one.

The app lets me create themed ranking lists, add items and participants, score offline, then submit results to the site where it calculates averages and sorts the leaderboard. Each item gets its own bar color, ties share rank numbers, and tapping any item opens a bottom sheet with the score breakdown or everyone's podium picks. It's vanilla PHP and MariaDB on shared hosting — no frameworks, no build tools, just files I can upload and forget about.

I'm proud of the whole workflow as much as the final product. The requirements went through four revisions before I wrote a single line of code, and the result is an app that does exactly what I need without any bloat. It supports multiple rankings, has a proper admin portal, and the Podium Picks feature lets each taster declare their personal top three. Not everything needs to scale to a million users. Sometimes you just want to rank seltzers with your friends and have a good-looking leaderboard to show for it.