Tutorbook

Students across the globe no longer have face-to-face support from teachers (due to school closures caused by COVID-19).

Talented individuals (like you) are confined in their homes with a lot more (free) time than usual.

I'm in the process of pivoting Tutorbook from a previously peer-to-peer SaaS platform (geared towards schools) to a new volunteer tutoring platform meant to satisfy the above described need.

Tutorbook's new web app connects students in need (who no longer have face-to-face support from teachers) with volunteer tutors (who want to make a difference from home).

If you're reading this and want to help out, contact me (just a subject line is all I need; email's in my profile)! We need as many volunteers as we can get. Or, if you're a dev, head over to our source available code, address an issue, and open a PR.

I finally got around to something that's been on Tutorbook's Roadmap for some time now: creating comprehensive and centralized developer documentation.

I've known for some time now that I would need such documentation in order to contract help for our open source web app; but I haven't had the time or resources to get around to it until now.

While our documentation is definitely still a work in progress and is being constantly updated and improved (i.e. every time we release a new package version), I'm pretty satisfied with how it turned out initially.

Check it out at https://tutorbook.app/docs and let me know if you want to help out on the development side of things!

While I don't really believe in a "Finished MVP" (I don't think I even believe in a fully "finished" anything), I had enough of a product by May of 2019 to partially replace (high school administrators are much too attached to their paper) the previously paper-based peer tutoring management system at my high school.

Now, for any curious developers, I have a few confessions to make (confessions that I feel comfortable making given that our web app has seen considerable improvements since May of 2019):

Most of that initial MVP was just a re-themed version of Google's FriendlyEats Codelab. I literally grabbed that project's source code, changed the theming, edited some of the web app's text, and deployed my "MVP" to Firebase Hosting.

Admittedly, I did have to implement a considerable number of changes before my app could actually be used to coordinate peer tutoring; but it did start out essentially as the FriendlyEats for tutoring.

For those first couple of months, the URL that I, and the school, had to point people to was https://tutorbook-779d8.firebaseapp.com/app. Not ideal. But it worked and my customer, the school, was happy (probably because they weren't expecting much from a high school student in the first place).

It's been a while since the idea behind Tutorbook was formed, but I'll try my best to keep this as accurate as possible.

The ideas behind Tutorbook were created originally for my Eagle Scout project and have since grown into a full-fledged side project (if one can even have a "full-fledged side project" haha).

Starting from the beginning: Tutorbook started with bagels.

My family and I were sitting around the table eating bagels, brainstorming possible ideas for my Eagle Scout project. I'm pretty sure that it was my oldest sister (I have three; FML) who suggested that I create an app to help manage peer tutoring (she had probably gone through the arduous process of filling out the paper forms to become a tutor earlier that week and decided that the previously paper-based system was outdated; especially for a school in the heart of Silicon Valley).

My Dad then pitched in and suggested that it be named "Tutorbook" after "Facebook" (and the fact that one would use it to book tutors).

I kind of laughed the whole thing off and decided to explore my own ideas; and we all know how that ended.