Manoa Pulse
Overview
Manoa Pulse is a web application designed to help University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa students quickly check how busy different campus locations are. Students often waste time walking to libraries, food courts, gyms, or study areas only to find that they are crowded. Manoa Pulse solves this problem by allowing users to view and submit real-time crowd updates for common campus locations.
The application includes a pulse feed, location pages, a map view, and a submit update page where users can report the current busyness level of a location. These updates help create a more useful and timely picture of campus activity.
You can view the project site here: Manoa Pulse GitHub Page
Screenshots
My Contributions
My main contributions focused on building and improving the core functionality of the application. I worked on the user interface, location-based pages, and the submit update workflow. This included helping users submit crowd updates, displaying location information, and making sure the navigation between pages was clear and consistent.
I also contributed to the database and backend structure used to store crowd updates. This involved working with Prisma, PostgreSQL, and the location data model so that submitted updates could be saved and displayed properly throughout the site.
In addition, I helped test and debug the application during development. This included fixing build errors, updating TypeScript types, resolving issues with Prisma models, and improving the user flow after submitting an update.
What I Learned
This project gave me more experience working on web application development as part of a team. I learned how important it is to keep the frontend, backend, database schema, and tests aligned with each other. Even small changes to a data model or route can affect many parts of the application.
I also gained more practice using tools such as Next.js, React, TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL, GitHub, and Vercel. Working with deployment and continuous integration helped me better understand how local development differs from production.
Most importantly, I learned how to build software around a real user problem. Manoa Pulse was not just a technical project. It required thinking about how students move around campus, what information would be useful to them, and how to make that information easy to access.