Digital Academic Planner for Students
Transforming EIWA's physical agenda into a collaborative digital platform. Built with Django and PostgreSQL for students who need better organization tools.
Hierarchical system with configurable access control
Live notifications and instant updates across devices
Integrated calendar with workload tracking
At EIWA (my school), students use physical agendas to track assignments and deadlines. However, distracted students often forget to write things down, lose track of tasks, or struggle to stay organized with paper-based systems.
The physical agenda works for some, but for students who need better organization tools, there was no digital alternative that understood our school's workflow and collaboration needs.
Agenda Virtual EIWA was created to solve this problem.
Agenda Virtual EIWA is a digital platform that brings the physical agenda online, adding collaboration features and smart organization tools:
Hierarchical role system with Leader, Co-leader, and Member roles. Granular permissions for task creation, editing, and deletion with approval workflows.
Push notifications system with browser support, notification center, and badge counters. 16 different activity types tracked and notified.
Unique invitation codes, join approval system, member warnings (3-strike system), and complete activity history logging.
Tasks with priorities, due dates, subject association, individual completion tracking, and collaborative editing with approval workflows.
Monthly calendar view with task visualization, filtering by group and subject, priority indicators, and deadline tracking.
Responsive design, dark mode, smooth animations, toast notifications, keyboard shortcuts, and WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance.
EIWA is under active development. Below are major milestones that shaped the platform's evolution.
Beta testing feedback helped refine moderation, UX and personalization systems.
Currently being used by students at EIWA for daily academic organization.
Platform has been actively used since December 2024, with continuous improvements based on real student feedback.
Maintainability and separation of responsibilities. Each app handles a specific domain, making the codebase easier to navigate and scale.
Better relational integrity and scalability. PostgreSQL's advanced features support complex queries and ensure data consistency.
Need for per-group configurable permissions. Django's built-in groups weren't flexible enough for dynamic, group-specific permission rules.
Flexible extensibility without schema explosion. Activity types can evolve without database migrations for each new field.
Django's built-in Groups are global and static. We needed per-group dynamic permissions that could be configured by group leaders in real-time.
Strong relational integrity was required. Tasks, groups, users, and permissions have complex relationships that benefit from SQL's ACID guarantees.
Vanilla JavaScript kept the stack simple and reduced complexity. For this use case, Django templates with progressive enhancement were sufficient.
Monolithic Django app was more appropriate for the scale. Microservices would add unnecessary complexity for a single-developer project.
Transparent about innovation and ongoing development.
Document upload with permission layers, validation, and approval workflows. Currently in testing phase with active users.
Dashboard that aggregates tasks and statistics across multiple groups. Recommended for single-group use while being refined.
PWA capabilities with service workers for offline task viewing and synchronization when connection is restored.
Creating a flexible permission model that could handle multiple roles and configurable settings while preventing permission conflicts and security holes.
Solution: Implemented hierarchical validation with permission checks at model, view, and template levels. Used Django's ORM to enforce database-level constraints.
As the application grew, inefficient database queries caused performance degradation, especially in list views with related objects.
Solution: Systematic use of select_related() and prefetch_related() throughout the codebase. Added database indexes on frequently queried fields.
Task creation and editing needed approval systems that were flexible enough to support different group configurations without code duplication.
Solution: Created separate request models (TaskRequest, TaskEditRequest) with JSON fields for proposed changes, enabling clean approval logic.
Ensuring the platform was usable by everyone, including users with disabilities, while maintaining a modern aesthetic.
Solution: Implemented keyboard navigation, ARIA labels, sufficient color contrast, and minimum touch target sizes throughout the interface.
Designing a database schema that could evolve without requiring major migrations or breaking existing functionality.
Solution: Used JSON fields for flexible metadata, proper foreign key relationships, and Django migrations for controlled schema evolution.
Successfully deployed and actively used by students and teachers for academic collaboration. The platform demonstrates proficiency in full-stack development, database design, and building scalable web applications with continuous iteration based on user feedback.
Sync tasks with external calendars for better workflow integration
Full-text search across tasks, groups, and subjects with filters
Complete offline functionality with background sync
Move experimental file system to stable production release
Configurable email alerts for important events and deadlines
Detailed productivity metrics and group performance insights