What I Personally Built
I initiated, developed, and currently maintain iot-bau.tech as a community service for university peers. The project required solving both client-side calculation precision and edge-hosting reliability:
- BAU GPA Calculation Algorithm: Built a compliant GPA calculator that handles Al-Balqa Applied University's credit-hour weighting system, 4.00 grading scale, and repeat course grade substitution rules entirely in client-side JavaScript.
- Syllabus & Course Indexing: Organized the curriculum for Computer Science and IoT majors into searchable semester hubs with direct access to lecture notes, past exam questions, lab manuals, and vetted reference books.
- Client-Side Execution Strategy: Designed all calculation and filtering logic to run locally in the student's browser. When tens of thousands of students check their grades on results day, the server only serves static assets from edge caches, resulting in 100% uptime with zero server cost spikes.
- Responsive Mobile Experience: Tuned the UI for fast rendering over variable 3G/4G cellular connections across Jordan, keeping initial bundle payloads minimal and eliminating heavy external JavaScript frameworks.
Engineering Challenges & Solutions
When university grades are published, traffic spikes from 100 visits/day to over 15,000 visits/hour within minutes. Traditional backend database queries would bottleneck and collapse under this load.
Solution: Shifted the entire architecture to static asset distribution via global edge CDNs, caching all curriculum metadata and keeping the GPA calculation logic purely client-side. The origin server experiences near-zero compute overhead during peak days.
BAU academic regulations state that when a course is repeated, the new grade completely replaces the previous grade in cumulative calculations, but total registered credit hours must not be double counted.
Solution: Developed a deterministic matrix that tracks previous vs. new course codes and credit weights, accurately computing both semester and cumulative GPAs with exact alignment to official university registrar transcripts.