UW Degree Explorer (uwdegree.org)

UW Degree Explorer is a comprehensive academic planning and community platform for University of Waterloo students. It bridges the gap between official university degree requirements and student-led community interaction, providing high-fidelity auditing and planning tools.

🚀 Core Features

🎓 Academic Engineering Suite

• Automated Degree Auditor: A specialized engine that parses official University of Waterloo Quest transcripts (PDF) to instantly visualize degree progress.
• Interactive Degree Planner: A drag-and-drop 8-term planning interface that tracks prerequisites and degree constraints in real-time.
• Breadth Constellation: A data visualization tool for tracking complex breadth requirements across different departments.
• Quantitative Planning: Built-in grade and workload calculators to predict GPA outcomes and manage weekly study hours.

💬 Community & Social Infrastructure

• Real-time Forum: A low-latency discussion board with dedicated sections for academic advice, carpooling, and campus life.
• Verified Student Identities: A trust-based system using university-affiliated badges to ensure credible peer-to-peer advice.
• Draft Persistence: Server-side draft management for posts and replies, ensuring zero data loss during long-form content creation.

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🏗️ System Architecture

The platform is architected as a pnpm monorepo, ensuring strict type safety and code reuse across the entire stack.

graph TD
    User((User)) -->|HTTPS| Web[Web App - Vite/React]
    Web -->|REST API| API[API Gateway - Express]
    API -->|Auth| Session[(Session Store - Redis/Postgres)]
    API -->|Drizzle ORM| DB[(Supabase - PostgreSQL)]
    Web -->|React Query| Cache{Client Cache}

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Technical Highlights:

• Monorepo Structure: Shared TypeScript schemas between backend (Drizzle) and frontend (React) using a packages/ workspace strategy.
• State Management: Implemented TanStack Query for optimistic UI updates, background fetching, and standardized error handling.
• Security:
  • Session-based authentication with express-session and connect-pg-simple.
  • Strict CORS whitelist management supporting multi-domain architecture (uwdegree.org and admin.uwdegree.org).
  • Trust Proxy configuration for secure cookie handling behind Railway's load balancers.
• Database Abstraction: Type-safe SQL generation via Drizzle ORM, with automated migration pipelines.

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📑 Engineering Challenges & Solutions

1. The Transcript Parsing Engine (Quest PDF)

Challenge: Quest PDF transcripts are unstructured and inconsistent across different departments and years. Solution:

• Developed a robust parsing pipeline using pdf-parse combined with a specialized regex-based tokenization engine.
• Implemented a fuzzy-matching logic to map extracted course strings (e.g., "CS 115 - Intro to CS") to the canonical database schema.
• Result: Supports 7000+ course variations with an average parsing latency of <800ms.

2. Complex Degree Requirement Mapping

Challenge: Waterloo degree requirements involve recursive prerequisite trees and "choose X of Y" constraints that are hard to represent in a relational schema. Solution:

• Engineered a graph-based representation for degree requirements.
• Implemented a client-side validation engine that traverses the user's current and planned courses to detect conflicts or missing prerequisites dynamically.

3. Real-time Community Performance

Challenge: Ensuring a responsive feel in the forum while maintaining data integrity across drafts and notifications. Solution:

• Leveraged Optimistic Updates in React Query to provide instant feedback on likes and bookmarks.
• Implemented a server-side last-activity tracking system to keep discussion threads fresh without redundant database scans.

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📦 Deployment & Infrastructure

• Frontend: Deployed on Cloudflare Pages for global edge delivery.
• Backend: Hosted on Railway with high-availability configuration.
• Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL) with advanced connection pooling.
• Admin Infrastructure: A dedicated internal dashboard at admin.uwdegree.org for real-time monitoring and moderation.

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📊 Scale & Metrics

• Indexed Courses: 7000+ courses from the University of Waterloo database.
• Parsing Coverage: Supports Major, Minor, and Joint degree structures.
• Latency: 95th percentile response time <200ms for core API endpoints.

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💻 Local Development

# Install & Setup
pnpm install
cp .env.example .env
pnpm --filter @workspace/db run migrate

# Run Dev Environment
pnpm dev

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Developed for the University of Waterloo Community.