# OctSeven - Shoham Fellner _Case Study_ A public platform where families build memorial pages for the people they lost. Development started two weeks after October 7th. - **Context:** October 7th Memorial Platform · Volunteer · 2023-2026 - **Role:** Front-End Developer - **Tech:** Next.js, Redux, MUI - **Link:** [Visit Site](https://www.octseven.com) _octseven.com is live and public. Shown here are the grid page and a blank creation form - deliberately not an individual memorial page, out of respect for the families whose stories they hold._ ## The Stakes Built for the families and friends of the people lost on October 7th, so they could create and share memorial pages for the loved ones they miss - a volunteer initiative, not a company product. Every profile on it represents a family who trusted us with someone they lost. Being volunteer-built doesn't lower the stakes here - the subject leaves no room for the usual margin of error. A bug that mixed up two people's data, or lost a family's story, wouldn't just be a defect. It would hurt people who chose to hand us these memories directly. ## My Role Part of a fully volunteer team from the project's first day to its last, alongside a rotating cast of other developers, plus product, UX/UI, UX writing, QA and DevOps - some there for the duration, some for a stretch. Nobody on the team had worked together before, and we were spread across time zones and technical backgrounds. I built most of what a visitor actually touches: the home page's profile grid and filtering, the create-profile form, the add-story form, and the profile page itself. Next.js was already chosen before I joined, for its SEO benefit on a public memorial site. ## The Problem The team formed to get a platform live as close to October 7th as possible - strangers, remote, from different technical backgrounds, building toward one deadline with no slack in it. Speed was the actual constraint, and it didn't let up: every technical choice had to hold up under a team that kept changing shape while the work was still in motion. ## Decisions ### A person checks every profile before it goes live - **Constraint:** A mix-up on a memorial profile isn't a minor bug - it's someone's trust in what we built with their loved one's memory. - **Decision:** A manager reviews every new profile for duplicates and accuracy before it publishes, and a profile's own author has to approve any story someone else adds to it. - **Trade-off:** Nothing goes live instantly - every submission waits on a person, which is slower than an open pipeline, and the right trade on a project where a wrong page is worse than a slow one. ### Forms built from a schema, not hand-coded per case - **Constraint:** The create-profile and add-story forms needed to hold up while the team itself kept changing, without every new contributor relearning bespoke form code. - **Decision:** Schema-driven forms - the same technique later projects would also lean on. - **Trade-off:** Some indirection between what a form shows and where that's defined - a fair trade against a rotating team that couldn't afford to onboard onto one-off form logic each time someone joined. ### Reaching for the tools everyone already knew - **Constraint:** A team of strangers, on a deadline, with people rotating in and out mid-project. - **Decision:** Redux and MUI over less familiar alternatives, chosen because they're the industry-standard tools most incoming contributors would already recognize. - **Trade-off:** Neither was necessarily the best technical fit on its own merits - the fit that mattered here was a shared team already knowing them. ## Evidence octseven.com is live - what follows is the grid and a blank form instead of a real memorial page, to protect the families and keep their loved ones' memory in their hands, not a case study. - [The full memorial grid, with filtering.](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/octseven/home-grid.png) - [The schema-driven form used to create a profile.](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/octseven/create-profile-form.png) ## Outcome Shipped and live at octseven.com, built and launched by a volunteer team that had never worked together before, on a timeline measured in weeks. The platform is feature-frozen now, and will be retired soon - its data merged into another existing platform, a maintenance-cost decision rather than a product one. ## What I'd Change The code carries real duplication across the create-profile and add-story forms - a direct cost of a volunteer team that kept changing shape, where consistency across contributors was harder to hold onto than the features themselves. I'd go back and refactor it properly. ## Other case studies - [Procurement Planning System](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/procurement-planning-system): Built from scratch to replace the legacy platform behind the Ground Forces' annual budget. - [Live Drone Patrol Console](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/live-drone-patrol-console): Put the responding guard and the command room on the same live picture, from anywhere in the world. - [Aura Cloud](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/aura-cloud): Resolves who can actually do what across AWS, and flags where identity and policy disagree. ## Elsewhere on this site - [Home](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/): Introduction, what I care about building, how I work, and the tech stack I reach for. - [Resume](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/resume): Full professional timeline - roles, projects, education and skills - with a downloadable CV. - [About](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/about): Longer-form background: how I got into frontend, the problems I like, and how I work with design. - [Contact](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/contact): How to reach me, what I am available for, and what to include so I can answer usefully. - [Case Study](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study): Four projects in depth - the problem, the constraints, what shipped, and what I would change. - [Privacy](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/privacy): What this site measures, which third parties see it, and how to opt out. ## Machine-readable sources - [This page as HTML](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/octseven): The same content rendered for browsers. - [This page as markdown](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/octseven.md): Stable markdown URL, served regardless of the Accept header. - [llms.txt](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/llms.txt): Site overview and the full list of pages. - [sitemap.xml](https://www.shoham-fe.dev/sitemap.xml): Every indexable URL. --- Canonical HTML: https://www.shoham-fe.dev/case-study/octseven