Devlog #01

Hello everyone! (˶ᵔᗜᵔ˶)ﾉﾞ

Hope you’re all doing well.

Welcome to the very first devlog of ScholarAtlas!

This week was mostly about building the foundation of the project before jumping into all the exciting features. There wasn’t anything flashy yet, but a lot happened behind the scenes.

So… let’s get into it. (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ

ScholarAtlas officially begins!

The project is now up and running using Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.

I also spent some time organizing everything into separate folders instead of throwing all the code into one place. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but it’ll make adding new features much easier later on. ( •̀ᴗ•́ )و

Landing Page

The homepage has finally started taking shape!

So far I’ve finished:

Hero Section
Stats Section
How It Works
Features Section

Instead of trying to make it look fancy immediately, I’m focusing on making everything clean and easy to understand first.

I’ll worry about making it prettier once the core functionality is there. (ᵔᵕᵔ)

How It Works

Originally I wanted to make a very simple “Step 1 → Step 2 → Step 3” section…

But then I realized different students have different needs.

For now ScholarAtlas will mainly focus on undergraduate, master’s and PhD applicants.

High school students will definitely be supported too, but that requires a slightly different application flow since many scholarships don’t ask for GPAs yet.

So that’s something I’ll work on later. (•̀ᴗ•́)و

Design Direction

I also spent some time deciding how I actually want ScholarAtlas to look.

Rather than using lots of gradients and bright colors, I’m aiming for something clean and modern.

Think websites like Stripe, Notion or Vercel.

Simple.

Professional.

Easy to use.

Hopefully it’ll make finding scholarships feel less overwhelming.

The Biggest Challenge…

Ironically…

The hardest part this week wasn’t coding.

It was getting Hackatime to work. (╥﹏╥)

Since I’m developing inside GitHub Codespaces, it kept refusing to authenticate and none of my coding time was being tracked.

I spent way longer than I expected debugging it.

Deleting configs…

Reconnecting extensions…

Checking logs…

Restarting VS Code…

Basically everything. (￣▽￣;)

Thankfully it’s finally working now!

So every minute I code on ScholarAtlas is finally being tracked correctly.

What’s Next?

Now that the foundation is finished, I can finally start building the fun stuff.

Next on my list is:

Scholarship Search Preview
Popular Scholarships section
Testimonials
FAQ
Call-to-Action section

After that, I’ll start working on the actual scholarship database and eventually the AI recommendation system.

Still a long way to go…

But seeing the homepage slowly come together is really motivating. (≧▽≦)

Thank you so much for reading!

I’ll be back with another update once there’s more progress to share.

Have a wonderful day! (´▽`)