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Exam Countdown

examcountdown.com

Exam Countdown is a free webapp that puts every UK GCSE and A-Level exam date in one place. Students pick the subjects and exam board they're sitting and get a personalised dashboard counting down to each paper, so the run-up to exam season is something concrete to plan against rather than a vague blur.

💡 The Spark: The Tutor’s Perspective

As a weekend private tutor running a small business, I constantly saw my students struggle with the overwhelming anxiety of exam season. Standard timetables are messy PDFs, scattered across various exam board sites, resulting in a "vague blur" of dates.

I built Exam Countdown to solve this exact problem. By turning a static, intimidating exam sheet into an interactive, highly visual dashboard, my students can now curate their exact subjects, reorder papers by study priority, and watch the time count down in real-time. It has transformed abstract stress into structured, actionable revision plans.

🛠️ The Build: The Developer’s Perspective

From an engineering standpoint, this was an exercise in building a highly interactive, responsive, and state-persistent single-page application with modern web tools.

Key Technical Highlights

  • The Stack: Built on Next.js (App Router) and TypeScript, styled with the utility-first Tailwind CSS v4 for high performance and sleek aesthetics.
  • Drag-and-Drop Interactive UI: Leveraged @dnd-kit/core and @dnd-kit/sortable to implement a smooth, layout-reorderable grid. Students can prioritize cards based on their study schedule.
  • Data Ingestion Pipeline: Standardized hundreds of official UK exam schedules (covering boards like AQA, Pearson/Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, Eduqas, and CCEA) from raw CSV tables, parsed directly into a typesafe PostgreSQL schema.
  • Authentication & Layout Persistence: Integrated BetterAuth with Drizzle ORM for lightweight, robust user accounts. This allows students to securely save their personalized dashboard, selected subjects, custom layouts, and theme preferences across devices.
  • Micro-Interactions & Themes: Designed custom client-side countdown clocks with a fluid multi-theme engine. Users can toggle between visual aesthetics tailored to their study mood (such as Midnight, Ocean, Forest, Sunset, Rose, and Light).

📈 Takeaways

This side-hustle successfully bridges my two passions: software engineering and education. It's a lightweight, production-ready tool that solves a real classroom problem while showcasing modern, reactive, stateful web development practices.