Overview
Volunteer associative internship with the French Volleyball Federation (Centre-Val de Loire): design and deliver VolleyX, a mobile match tracking application — from the first conversation with referees to App Store submission.: design and deliver VolleyX, a mobile volleyball match scoring and tracking application. The goal was to transform referee needs into usable field features, then support the app through App Store publication.
Working with Non-Technical Stakeholders
The first thing this internship taught me was listening before coding.
Referees described their needs in field language, without necessarily translating them into technical features. My job was first to reframe, ask the right questions, and extract the real constraints behind each request. This translation discipline, from business need to specifications, shaped the design choices.
The main delivered features covered match scoring, role-based access control and real-time notifications. UX/UI flows were then adjusted from 8+ business feedback points, with iterations focused on referee usage.
Making Decisions Autonomously
In an associative context, there’s no technical hierarchy to validate each choice. I had to own decisions that would stick: role modeling, permission management, hosting choices. That forces you to reason through trade-offs rather than follow recipes.
The main constraint wasn’t technical complexity — it was the timeline. That frame brought everything back to essentials: what needs to work at delivery, and what can wait?
What This Experience Changed
Before this internship, I could spend time on a technically interesting feature. After: I think first in terms of user impact. A referee mid-match has zero tolerance for latency or ambiguity — that constraint taught me to evaluate every decision against its actual usefulness.
I also understood that shipping an application is more than coding: managing feedback, documenting decisions, anticipating legal constraints (GDPR, App Store), and maintaining stakeholder trust throughout.
Outcomes
The application was published on the App Store and reached a 4.8 rating, with around 25 downloads in the first week. Beyond the numbers, this experience taught me how to hold a short product cycle: understand a need, ship a usable version, collect feedback, then improve without losing sight of the real usage context.
Technical details — architecture, relational schema, stack, implementation challenges — are documented in the project page: