Campus Vitality
Student insurance platform, built by a team of five
A MERN web platform for students to compare and buy insurance plans, with three user roles, Stripe payments and email notification. I led a five-engineer team and established the review standards the repository was built to.
Verified: each of these is checkable in the repository
- 5
- engineers, team I led5 named contributors
- 3
- user roles with distinct permissionsstudents, admins, sales teams
Five engineers on one codebase for a semester, all learning as they went. The technical problem was ordinary; the coordination problem was not.
A React client with Tailwind and Material UI against an Express API and MongoDB, with JWT authentication, three role-based permission sets, Stripe checkout including webhook handling, and transactional email.
Why it is built this way
01Review standards before feature work
We agreed on what a reviewable pull request looked like before building anything, which is what kept five people from producing five codebases.
02Roles as a first-class model
Students, administrators and sales each have distinct permissions, modelled explicitly rather than accumulating conditionals in the UI.
03Webhooks for payment truth
Payment state comes from Stripe webhooks rather than the client's success redirect, so a closed tab does not lose an order.
Leading this taught me that review standards are a coordination tool before they are a quality tool. The reviews caught bugs, but their real function was keeping five people's mental models close enough together that the parts fit.
Next project
Subscription Manager
Native iOS subscription tracking with on-device inference