So, here's the deal.
I built a web app for Ateneo students to track and calculate their QPI. It's designed to make it easy to predict your grades and see where you stand anytime during the semester. It saves your courses and can auto-fill them based on your degree program. It started as a tool to make my own life easier, and it seems to have helped a lot of other students too.
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.
I saw it was getting thousands of user sessions. It was cool to see that this personal dashboard I'd built for myself was something so many other students were also using to plan their semesters. Seeing it hit the #2 spot on Google for "QPI calculator" was a pretty surreal moment.
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.