SoftLaunch

Inspiration

While helping friends prepare for tech-company internship interviews, I noticed three recurring pain-points:

Fragmented resources : Coding practice sat on LeetCode, behavioural prep hid in random blogs, and key deadlines lived in Excel sheets.

Lack of real feedback: Solving a problem is one thing, but having someone ask “Why that data structure?” is what mimics an actual interview.

Poor visibility on company-specific content: People scrambled to find resume examples or application guides hours before submitting.

SoftLaunch was born to glue those pieces together: a single place to practice, plan, and prepare.

What it does

SoftLaunch is a single-page web app that bundles:

Company hubs – timelines, application guides and sample résumés (e.g. Atlassian, Google, Canva).

Academy → Technical track – an in-browser Monaco editor, webcam preview, heuristic feedback and cycling interviewer prompts.

Academy → Behavioural track – flash-card style behavioural questions with model answers.

Calendar view – a colour-coded month grid that flags each company’s open/close dates (coming next sprint).

Progress tracking (beta) – a local cache records which problems a user has attempted.

How we built it

React + Vite for the SPA shell and hot-reload speed.

Inline CSS-in-JS tokens (cards, pills, greens/blues) to avoid adding a full utility framework.

Monaco Editor for code input; verdicts are sent through a hidden iframe sandbox via postMessage.

WebRTC (getUserMedia) for a privacy-respecting, local-only webcam preview.

React Router for /academy, /companies/:id, /calendar, etc.

GitHub Projects → Vercel Preview Deploys to keep iteration tight.

Challenges we ran into

Credential races inside the sandbox: fixed with a “ready” handshake.

Invisible text when users had dark-mode extensions: solved by enforcing color:#111827 on card content.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

0→1 prototype in two days with ~1 000 LOC.

A live coding pane that judges user code offline and shows heuristic feedback.

A clean design system that makes new pages feel on-brand in minutes, not hours.

What we learned

Sandboxing untrusted JavaScript isn’t scary when you isolate it in an iframe and use postMessage.

Students value specific feedback more than perfect grading; even a heuristic “Your code is < 30 chars—check edge-cases” nudges them productively.

A tiny design-token file eliminates the temptation to hand-tweak colours and margins everywhere.

What's next for SoftLaunch

Full calendar tab – auto-sync open/close dates with Airtable.

Real interview-style grading – timeout detection, memory-profile checks

Auth login + cloud sync – let users track progress across devices.

More company hubs – Adobe, WiseTech Global, Canva (design track).

Community reviews – peer feedback on résumés and mock answers, turning SoftLaunch into a supportive network, not just a toolset.

Built With

• jsx