Sole developer · KKN · 2026
Desa Loji had a lot going for it and almost nothing written about it in one place. I built it a site of its own, and made the admin side simple enough that it would still be running after I left.
To learn anything about the village you had to scatter across half the web. There was no single place for the profile, the local businesses, the news, or the tourism spots, and whoever ran a site after me would not be a developer. I knew the site would be abandoned the moment it became inconvenient.
I built the whole thing single-handedly during my university community service programme (KKN). Two weeks to the first build, then fixes and adjustments across the full 40 days while the rest of the programme was still running. The CMS had to be genuinely easy and it had to come with a written guide, so both were part of the delivery, not an afterthought.
Adopted by the village government as their primary digital information channel, and still live today at loji.web.id. I opened the repository on GitHub, and at least four other KKN village teams used it for their own sites and told me so directly.
How to gather requirements by actually talking to people, and how to decide what belongs in a product rather than just building what I was handed. The harder lesson was designing for the handover. I also learned to hold a timeline while the rest of the programme was still running, because this was not the only thing I was doing during KKN.