So, here's the deal.
I built a web app for Ateneo students to track grades and test QPI scenarios during the semester. It saves your courses, can auto-fill them by degree program, and answers the question everyone asks before finals: what do I still need?
It started with the "what-if" game.
You know that game you play mid-semester? "What do I need on the final to get a B+?" or "If I get an A here and a C+ there, what will my QPI be?" I was constantly doing this, trying to figure out where I stood and what I needed to aim for.
The existing online calculator was fine for a single, quick calculation. But if you wanted to play around with different grade scenarios, it was a hassle. You’d have to manually re-enter all your courses and units every time you wanted to just tweak one grade. I wanted something more like a dashboard, a place where my courses were always there and I could easily predict outcomes.
I just decided to build it.
It wasn't a huge, planned-out project. I just wanted to solve this specific annoyance for myself. My goal was to build a tool where I could plug in my courses once and then just play with the grades as the semester went on.
So I started working on a simple web app as a side project. I spent some time gathering the curriculum data so the auto-fill feature would be accurate, and focused on making it clean and fast, especially on mobile. It was just a tool built to answer my own "what-if" questions a little faster.
Then it sort of took on a life of its own.
Once I had it working, I started using it all the time. I shared the link with a few friends, and they shared it with others. I never really promoted it; it just spread through word-of-mouth. It wasn't until I checked the analytics a while later that I realized what was happening.
The analytics eventually told the story: 9,600+ sessions, 131,000+ interactions, and the #2 Google spot for "QPI calculator." A finals-week tool I built for myself had become something Ateneo students were actively using to plan their semesters.
It was a good reminder.
This project was a good reminder that if you have a small, recurring frustration in your own workflow, chances are a lot of other people feel the same way. I just wanted a better way to plan and predict my grades, and it turned out that was a problem a lot of us were looking to solve.