CUF

An ontario university filter/eligibility parser for Canadian students.

• Gets information on your top university
• Lets the matching algorithm pick your best match
• Look for information on all available universities

App Features

Questionnaire

  Gather information from end-user to dynamically render dashboards 
  (major constraints: university, tuition, canadian status)

Loading screen

  Loader between API calls

Dashboards

  Dynamic dashboards which populates cards, doughnut & bar charts based 
  on selected options: best match (algorithm) or selected university

Main programs used

Client

TailwindCss, React,Javascript

Server

Cheerio, Node, Express, Axios

Packages, Libraries, Techonolgies & APIs Used

React UseContext

    Refactored code to reduce number of API calls, lines of code & speed of data
    load to enhance end-user experience. 

Chart.js

    Used to create doughnut & bar charts

Axios

    Process http requests

Cheerio

 A fast headless browser (does not render actual UI )  that is DOM parser without executing Javascript on the webpages, unlike Puppeteer.

React Load Spinner

    Handle loading screen on API wait

Survey.js

    Creates questionnaire & extract array to dynamically render data

Icons

    React Icons, icon8 & heroIcons

Routing

React router

APIs

My own REST API deployed on render (checkout CUF_server repo)

Notifications

React Toastify to handle notifications

Challenges

Efficiency #2

Put data in Firebase Real Time Deployment Cloud Database.
Made the server stateless to make my server's API truly RESTFUL.
This reduced API call from time from 10 seconds to <0.5 seconds

Efficiency

Refactored code to make use of lazy loading & react useContext to improve load speed of the full-stack application.

Web-Scraping & compiling the data before deploying the REST API

This is was first time creating my own json data from scratch since the data I needed was not available to the public. Finding reliable data & scrapable website required lots of patience since some parts were retricted or had outdated information.

I also learnt about headless browsers, web-scraping & its ethics.

String Manipulation

My data structures & algorithms practice with leetcode helped a lot with the string manipulation I had to do.
I learnt a lot of newer ways to use array & string methods with higher order functions. 
Really helped solidified my string manipulation skills.

Run Locally

Clone the project.

Client

  npm run dev

Server

  nodemon index.js

CUF_server

https://github.com/hakeem0114/CUF_server