Youth Management

The brief

A youth union branch tracking its members in spreadsheets and a shared drive of scanned documents. They needed a member record that one person could update from a phone and everyone else could trust.

The approach

Deliberately small. An Express + MongoDB API with four collections — members, documents, users, tokens — and a Zalo Mini App as the only client, because the members were already in Zalo and nobody was going to install anything else.

Documents upload straight to S3 through the API, so a scanned certificate attaches to the member it belongs to instead of living in a folder named after the month it arrived.

The harder parts

The hard part was refusing to build more. Every conversation surfaced another field, another report, another role. The system does one thing — keeps an accurate member list with its paperwork attached — and it does that without a manual, which is the only reason it is still being used.