Scolar

The context

IKOUE builds Scolar to run a school's academic year from start to finish: enrolment, classes and timetables, then grades, averages and report cards at the end of each term. Around that core sit the people (students, guardians, teachers, staff) and the day-to-day life of the school, with announcements, messages and documents.

The same application ships twice: as a web app, and as a desktop app for schools that would rather install it on their own machines.

My role

I joined the frontend team as a software engineer. Several of us built features in parallel, each on its own branch, and the hard part was rarely the feature itself. It was making a dozen features, written by different hands, feel like one product.

What I built

• User management: creating and editing accounts, resetting passwords, searching and filtering
• Bulk actions on tables: selecting many rows at once to enable, disable or delete them
• Planning, and a redesign of the timetable grid
• A redesign of enrolments, the screen every school uses most at the start of the year
• The design system: turning the design files into shared components, and bringing the existing screens in line with them
• The first brick of the parents' mobile app in Flutter: how it starts up, and how it blocks an outdated version until the parent updates it

Lessons

Agree on the shared components before anyone builds a feature. We merged a lot of good work that looked slightly different from one screen to the next, and fixing that afterwards cost more than settling it at the start would have.