College Filter - Stardance

Ship #1

@Quantalabs on College Filter · 29 days ago

I made a simple web app that filters through colleges using public Common Data Set data. Currently, CDS files aren't accessible to the public to filter through in a central space, so this app lets you enter in different preferences. There's a lot of things I want to add, such as better layout and more filtering options, as well as displaying more useful information on the frontend.
One of the hardest parts was figuring out how to reduce the time it took to find the colleges, since I have to send a lot of different request. I realized, since most of this data is constant for basically the entire year, until a new class of students are admitted, I can cache the data once and use a local copy. Adding this drastically reduced loading times to roughly <1 second per request.

3 devlogs
4h
8.28x multiplier
33 Stardust

Try project → See source code →

Open comments for this post

@Quantalabs on College Filter · 29 days ago

46m 55s logged

I had a lot of issues when deploying, mainly because the server took too long to respond. So, I added a cache file that just stores gpa and private/public school data for each school, so that the app doesn’t need to send thousands of requests for a valid school. Now, response times are down to a couple seconds at most, but usually <1 second, which I’m okay with for now.

Open comments for this post

@Quantalabs on College Filter · about 1 month ago

2h 14m 16s logged

Added actual filtering functionality using collegedata.fyi to get CDS data. I’m having issues distinguishing between public and private, so I may remove that functionality or try and distinguish schools by if they charge different in- and out-of-state tuition.

(yes i did create an object that has all 50 states split among 5 different regions)

Open comments for this post

@Quantalabs on College Filter · about 1 month ago

1h 0m 40s logged

I setup the express project and landing page so far. I used the MD.css retro framework to style the website. I added a bit of other CSS to make the form look a bit better. I currently have a couple criteria by which users can filter schools (the actual filtering functionality will be implemented soon)