📘 About the Project — SFU Insight

Inspiration

Choosing courses at Simon Fraser University often feels like guesswork. Students jump between SFU course outlines, Reddit threads, RateMyProfessor, spreadsheets from friends, and group chats—yet still don’t get a clear picture of what a course is actually like.

SFU Insight was inspired by that frustration.

I wanted to build a single, student-driven platform where SFU students could:

Understand workload, difficulty, and fairness before enrolling
Learn what actually matters to succeed in a course
Access alumni notes, study guides, and recommended resources
Plan and save schedules visually in one place

The goal was simple: help students make better academic decisions using real student experiences, not just official descriptions.

What I Learned

This project pushed me far beyond just building a UI. I learned how to design and implement a production-style web application with authentication, permissions, and user-generated content.

Key things I learned:

How to design relational data models for reviews, contributions, votes, and schedules
How to enforce security using authentication and database-level policies
How to handle real-world UI edge cases like loading states, empty states, and failed network requests
How to incrementally build features while keeping the system maintainable

I also gained a deeper appreciation for UX decisions—small details like when to prompt login, how to guide users through contribution flows, and how to present complex information clearly.

Challenges I Faced

One of the biggest challenges was making sure features worked reliably and securely, not just visually.

Some key challenges included:

Debugging silent failures like "Failed to fetch" caused by misconfigured API routes or RLS policies
Ensuring users could only submit one review or upvote per item
Designing flexible schemas that could support multiple contribution types without duplication
Keeping the UI responsive and intuitive as complexity grew

Another major challenge was deciding what not to build. I focused on shipping a solid MVP with real value instead of overengineering features too early.

Reflection

SFU Insight is more than just a course review site—it’s a platform built by students, for students. It combines planning, insight, and community knowledge into a single experience.

This project taught me how real-world systems break, how to fix them, and how to design with users in mind. Most importantly, it reinforced that good software isn’t just about code—it’s about trust, usability, and clarity.

If I were to continue developing SFU Insight, I’d focus next on moderation tools, richer analytics, and deeper instructor-level insights.

Powered by SFU students, for SFU students.