Case study
Campusly In progress
A campus platform — map, maintenance reporting with duplicate detection, events and transport — built by eight people to a fixed demo date. I manage the project and work in the backend team.
The problem
Eight people, four modules, one semester. Team projects rarely fail because of bad code. They fail because the frontend and the backend disagree about the API, and because the scope quietly grows until nothing works end to end on demo day.
What I did & decided
- Surveyed the campus systems that already exist before scoping, so the team builds what is missing rather than a copy of what is there.
- Split the work between five backend and three frontend developers, and made the OpenAPI contract the single agreement between them.
- Set a scope gate on 17 November: a module whose core is not working end to end by then is dropped from the demo instead of half-finished.
- Wrote down what is out of scope, and the KVKK (Turkish data-protection law) obligations, before any code.
- On the backend: ASP.NET Core 8 Web API with EF Core, PostgreSQL and JWT authentication. The design uses
PostgreSQL trigram similarity (
pg_trgm) to spot duplicate maintenance reports.
What came of it
- In progress. Code freeze is on 8 December and the demo on 15 December 2026.
- I will update this page with what shipped, what we cut at the scope gate, and why.
Next case: Cached Personnel System with Local LLM