Alpha Academy
Full-Stack Developer
About the Project
Alpha Academy runs holiday learning programmes for Nigerian secondary school students alongside an undergraduate course-enrolment track. The platform is four applications: a student-facing progressive web app, an operations dashboard with a rich-text CMS for staff to publish programme content, a NestJS API, and a standalone waitlist site used to capture demand ahead of each intake.
Key Highlights
- Built the student app as an installable PWA so students on unreliable connections can keep working offline
- Shipped a CMS-backed admin console letting non-technical staff publish programmes and content without a deploy
- Built the enrolment flow spanning both the secondary-school programme track and undergraduate courses
- Set up Playwright end-to-end coverage running against the real API rather than mocks
- Separated a lightweight waitlist site from the main app so pre-launch capture stayed fast and independently deployable
Technical Challenges
The audience is students in Nigeria, many on intermittent mobile data, so treating connectivity as optional rather than assumed shaped most of the frontend decisions — service-worker caching, optimistic UI, and careful control over bundle size. On the testing side, I deliberately ran end-to-end tests against the live API instead of mocks: slower and occasionally flaky, but it catches contract drift between the four codebases that mocked tests would happily pass over.