DELF DALF Korea

DELF and DALF are the French state's diplomas in French. In Korea, every candidate registers for a sitting through one national system: pick a session, pick a centre, pick a level, pay, and receive a convocation. A few thousand people a year depend on it working during the two weeks a session is open.

It ran on a codebase old enough to predate most of what the web now assumes. Registration, payment and candidate records all sat in it, and the security matched its age: no real separation between the public form and the administration behind it, and personal data handled the way personal data was handled in 2010.

Our brief was to rebuild the whole process, not patch it — the registration flow rewritten, the payment step routed through a current domestic gateway, and candidate data put on a footing an examination centre could actually stand behind.

It got close. The registration and payment path worked end to end. What remained was migration and the administration side. The project was stopped partway through, before any of it replaced the old system.

We list it because the work was real and the ending is part of the record. The lesson we took from it is about planning, not code: a rewrite whose scope is 'everything the old system does' has no clear edge, and finding that out halfway through is finding it out too late.