One hard semester
built this whole
app.

A visa hold-up kept our actual professor stuck overseas for most of the semester, and the class got handed to a substitute who never really taught it. Attendance was not mandatory, so the room emptied out fast, and by midterms I was lost in a course I had been genuinely excited about in August.

The problem was not that the material was hard. It was that once a class starts going wrong, there is no way for students to catch each other, and no way to catch up on your own.

What I wanted was not a better textbook or a smarter chatbot. It was a way to actually be connected to the course (the material, the deadlines, the people in the same seats I was) instead of being in it alone.

That is the whole idea CourseConnect is named after: connected to the course, instead of being in it alone.

The first version lived in a browser. Upload a syllabus and see exactly what you had: deadlines, classes organized in one place, a Google Calendar connection so none of it lived in a separate app. You could add things yourself, and there was an AI you could actually talk to about the material instead of just staring at a schedule.

Then I tried building the "connect" half of the name literally: a messaging layer so students in the same class could find and actually talk to each other. It turned out to be genuinely hard to get right, and I could not make it work the way I wanted, so I pivoted instead of forcing it. None of that messaging layer shipped.

The real insight was that a syllabus is not something you read once at a desk. It is something you need on you: in the lecture hall, on the walk to class, at 11pm the night before something is due. So in early 2026 I rebuilt CourseConnect as an iOS app.

Your day on one timeline, lectures recorded and written up for you, a tutor per class, grades imported from Safari, widgets on your lock screen. It is live in TestFlight now, free while it is built out, and there is a lot more of what got cut during the messaging detour still on the roadmap.