Leading by Example

PeterPortal is an application that helps students to discover courses and create a 4-year academic plan, and joining the team was my introduction to team-based software development for a large audience. In the first few months, I fixed bugs and introduced new features such as the ability to import data from a transcript into their 4-year plan.

Following that, I finished a feature to let users create multiple 4-year plans. It required familiarizing myself with code that others had written over a year prior, understanding the app’s data layer, and adjusting the design to ensure ease of use. I also started redesigning the user interface to improve visual consistency while retaining all functionality. Because of my efforts, I was promoted to be the project lead for the 2024-2025 school year.

Using Vision to Build Momentum

Unsurprisingly, project teams often face the challenges of student availability, needing a clearly-defined timeline, and being secondary to academics. But by building a shared timeline and using key academic calendar dates, we were able to address these concerns. I started by gathering individuals’ goals and visions for the project and consolidated them into quarterly timelines. For the first time, there were specific dates and times in the quarter that mattered for each person – if we wanted people to be able to compare their academic plan to the school’s Graduation Requirements, we had to complete it before students started to enroll in next quarter’s classes.

This alone, however, is not enough to motivate a team. Investing our efforts to help new team members proves paramount to our ability to want to learn. As the team lead, I scheduled 1-1 meetings to find out where individual members struggled, to see what they weren’t confident about, and to address gaps in communication. Additionally, we agreed on a steady set of requirements and built any necessary shared logic that enabled us to parallelize work on the feature. Because of this, our team of 12 developers had 7 major releases in 6 months and a 70% year-over-year increase in contributions.

Finding Unlocking Opportunities

Especially in an existing team, there already exists a backlog. Upgrade the tech stack? Finish a feature that was started years ago? Something missing from the beginning? All fair game. We bring all team members to a point where they can build and own a big release, and by doing so, long-standing issues suddenly become... feasible. Because of our ability to subdivide tasks as a team, things like “migrate to Next” are no longer just things that “will happen eventually” – they happen as soon as they unlock opportunities for even bigger growth.

In fact, we’re looking to do something that most organizations don’t do often: merge two completely separate apps into one unified platform for UCI students planning courses. After PeterPortal took care of long-standing tech debt and reworked how users count course credit from other schools, it was stable enough to talk about larger structural change. Through the joint effort of the AntAlmanac team, PeterPortal team, and UI/UX team, we realized we could create a sum greater than its two parts. This is only possible because of our unique advantage: ICSSC has a large audience, and both student-made apps are under a single organization.

We plan to rebrand PeterPortal as “AntAlmanac Planner” in March of 2026 to put it under one familiar umbrella name. In the process, AntAlmanac (Scheduler) users would discover the ability to create their academic planner, and PeterPortal (AntAlmanac Planner) users would be able to directly import their data to the Scheduler each quarter. The main ideas were clear: PeterPortal takes care of long-term planning, AntAlmanac helps you schedule those classes each quarter.

But let’s take a step back. It only made sense to merge because PeterPortal shares the same technologies used for development, has achieved its own design consistency, and has grown a team that can handle the largest of releases in a short 10 weeks. This is the growth that I seek in every opportunity, no matter how small it starts.