COMS309 · Software Development Practices

CareerConnect —
2nd Place.

A full-stack job-search platform organised by career clusters, built with a four-person team following Scrum practices over a semester of two-week sprints.

overview

What We
built.

CareerConnect made it effortless for students to discover and connect with peers and mentors in their career cluster — engineering, business, and more. We followed Scrum processes, gathered continuous feedback from TAs, and delivered incremental features across the semester, ultimately winning 2nd place in the course competition.

As lead backend developer I integrated a Hugging Face AI model for chat moderation, designed a MySQL import pipeline to ingest 1,000+ universities and 2,000+ majors from Excel on each run, and built RESTful APIs for cluster-based user search, one-to-one encrypted messaging, and real-time notifications for both individual and group conversations.

This hands-on work sharpened my skills in API design, secure data ingestion, real-time communication, and Scrum delivery — preparing me to craft scalable, user-centric applications.

highlights

Key
contributions.

AI Chat Moderation
Integrated a Hugging Face model to automatically flag and filter inappropriate messages in real time across individual and group conversations.
Data Ingestion Pipeline
Built a MySQL import pipeline that ingested 1,000+ universities and 2,000+ majors from Excel spreadsheets on every server run — ensuring data freshness without manual intervention.
RESTful API Design
Architected cluster-based user search endpoints, one-to-one encrypted messaging, and a real-time notification system serving both individual and group threads.
2nd Place — Course Competition
Out of all project teams in the cohort, CareerConnect placed 2nd, recognised for its polish, feature completeness, and real-world applicability.

technology

Stack &
tools.

Full-stack Spring Boot + React application with a MySQL relational database, CI/CD via GitLab, and WebSocket connections for real-time messaging.
Spring Boot React MySQL Hugging Face WebSocket GitLab CI/CD REST APIs Scrum
View Code on GitHub → Watch Demo