Overseer
← All projects

// Industry

Overseer

Astro React TypeScript Tailwind CSS UI/UX Full-Stack
2026 · Ongoing

Overview

In-house management platform I help build at Skill Samurai Lane Cove, a STEM centre. I lead front-end delivery: the parent portal, staff tooling, in-app help, and the release-notes system, in Astro and React.

Details

Overseer is an in-house platform built at Skill Samurai Lane Cove, the STEM centre I work for. It runs the day to day: student records, coach-run classes, term enrolment, and a parent portal for feedback and progress. It is a Turborepo monorepo with an Astro front end on a backend-for-frontend (BFF) layer that proxies a JWT-authenticated Hono API.

My work sits mostly on the front end and the surrounding user experience, shipping across releases since v1.2.0.

Every screenshot below is from a development build populated with seeded demo data. All names, records, and login details shown are fictitious.

Staff console dashboard with weekly roster, today's classes, and open tasks The staff console: enrolment stats, weekly roster, and coach task queue. The sidebar version badge links straight to the release notes.

Parent Portal

  • Rebuilt the portal mobile first, with long-feedback handling and a fix for iOS sign-in scroll.
  • Re-toned the portal to a teal-green palette and aligned hover and selection colours with the theme.
  • Restored a gradient progress fill so parents read a student’s progression at a glance.
  • Coach attribution by default, so parents can see who is teaching.

Parent portal dashboard showing a child's progress, learning paths, and coach note The parent-facing dashboard: per-child progress, platform logins, and the latest coach note.

Parent feedback history at a narrow width Feedback history at a narrow width, with long entries collapsed behind a show-more.

In-App Help for Staff

  • Built a contextual help system: a help popover with inline tips and worked examples on free-text fields.
  • Authored guides for each staff area, with return-to-origin navigation so help never loses your place.

Release Notes

  • Designed a staff-facing release-notes system: a version changelog content collection, a page to read it, and a sidebar version badge that links the deployed build straight to its notes.
  • Wrote the notes in a developer voice and set an authoring guideline for the team.

Term & Record Management

  • Term rollover with cascade delete and hierarchical navigation, plus term-status cascade down to classes.
  • Coach-run classes, record clean-up, an activity log, and safe bulk deletion.

Staff student detail with parent-visible feedback and internal notes Student record: parent-visible feedback with an author-name toggle, staff-only internal notes, and managed platform credentials.

Staff parents list with search and portal-access status Records management: searchable parent list with portal-access status and per-row actions.

Interaction Polish

  • Kept modals open when a text selection ends on the backdrop, fixing an accidental drag-close.
  • Followed the navigation trail for back links, so users land where they expect.
  • Larger feedback modal, archived terms in their own section, and assorted usability fixes.

Reliability

  • Scheduled rolling database backups with post-backup snapshot-integrity verification and a freshness healthcheck on the sidecar.

Stack

  • Front end Astro with React islands, Tailwind CSS, sanitised Markdown rendering.
  • Platform Hono API with JWT auth, SQLite, Turborepo, pnpm workspaces, Docker, and Playwright end-to-end tests.
← Work