Inspiration
UniConnecT was inspired by the communication gap we noticed in university life. Students, alumni, faculty, and admins often depend on scattered WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, emails, and LinkedIn posts to stay connected. Important updates get lost, students miss opportunities, and alumni connections are hard to maintain.
We wanted to build one verified, private campus platform where every member belongs to the same trusted university network.
What it does
UniConnecT is a university-focused social platform for students, alumni, faculty, staff, and admins. It includes a campus feed, posts, comments, reactions, jobs, events, groups, real-time messages, notifications, university news, lost and found, shuttle tracking, mentorship, and admin tools.
The platform is multi-tenant, meaning each university has its own isolated network and data. For UIU, it creates one central place for campus communication, professional opportunities, and daily student services.
How we built it
We built UniConnecT as a full-stack monorepo. The frontend uses React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, TanStack Query, Zustand, and Socket.io client. The backend uses Node.js, Express, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, Socket.io, JWT authentication, httpOnly refresh cookies, and Bull queues for background jobs.
The API is organized into modules such as auth, users, feed, jobs, events, groups, messages, notifications, news, shuttle, lost-found, mentorship, search, moderation, and admin. Shared types and schemas are kept in a separate package so the frontend and backend stay consistent.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge was handling multi-tenancy safely. Every feature had to respect the university boundary so users from one university could never access another university’s data.
Another challenge was combining many product areas into one platform without making the app feel crowded. We had to balance social features, campus tools, real-time chat, admin control, and role-based access.
Real-time features were also challenging because messages, notifications, shuttle updates, and online presence all needed reliable Socket.io behavior.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that UniConnecT is not just a landing page or prototype. It has a real backend structure, database migrations, authentication flow, protected routes, role-aware pages, REST APIs, real-time socket support, and many working product modules.
We are also proud of the product direction: it solves a real campus problem in a way that feels specific to university life instead of copying a general social network.
What we learned
We learned how important architecture is when building a large full-stack product. Features like authentication, tenant isolation, sockets, database schema design, and shared contracts need to be planned carefully from the beginning.
We also learned that user experience matters as much as backend logic. A campus platform must be fast, clear, mobile-friendly, and trustworthy for students, alumni, faculty, and admins.
What's next for UniConnecT
Next, we want to improve the admin dashboard, mentorship experience, analytics, content moderation, and mobile experience. We also plan to make real-time features stronger, improve notification delivery, and prepare the platform for more universities beyond UIU.
Our long-term goal is to make UniConnecT the trusted digital campus network for universities in Bangladesh and South Asia.
Use of OpenAI Technologies
OpenAI Codex was used as a core development partner throughout UniConnecT. We used Codex to analyze the existing codebase, understand relationships between frontend pages, backend modules, database migrations, shared schemas, and documentation, then improve the project in a structured way.
Codex helped with planning features, reviewing architecture, debugging TypeScript/React/Express issues, polishing UI flows, writing project documentation, and generating submission-ready explanations. Instead of only using AI for text generation, we used it as an engineering assistant inside the actual repository.
Use of AGENTS.md, Skills, and Agentic Workflows
The project includes an AGENTS.md file that defines how Codex should work inside the repository. It instructs the agent to use the existing Graphify knowledge graph before answering codebase questions, so Codex can understand the project through scoped code relationships instead of randomly searching files.
We also used local agent skills stored under .agents/skills/, including frontend design, polishing, image-to-code, redesign, and Graphify-related workflows. These helped guide UI decisions, codebase analysis, documentation, and structured implementation.
Graphify was especially useful because it created a knowledge graph of the codebase. Codex could query that graph to understand modules, features, and cross-file relationships before making recommendations or writing content.
Demo and Source Code
The project has a working source code repository with a React/Vite frontend, Express/TypeScript backend, PostgreSQL database migrations, Redis-backed queues, Socket.io real-time features, and shared TypeScript contracts. Right now at this point my project live but it's not fully finished yet. We will need more time to finish our project. If you want you can access the webapp using this credentials:
Email: tester@uiu.ac.bd Password: Tester@2026! Role: student Username: tester
The demo showcases UniConnecT as a verified private university network with a campus feed, jobs, events, groups, real-time messaging, notifications, university news, lost and found, shuttle tracking, mentorship, and admin tools.
Real Problem Solved
UniConnecT solves the problem of fragmented university communication. Instead of students, alumni, faculty, and admins depending on scattered WhatsApp groups, Facebook pages, emails, and LinkedIn posts, UniConnecT brings everything into one trusted, university-scoped platform.
Documentation and Reproducibility
The repository includes documentation for architecture, API routes, database design, deployment, socket events, product direction, and development setup. This makes the project easier for others to understand, run locally, extend, and reproduce.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.