It started in 2023, when I was still in high school. My friend Richard Lu had an idea of building a website where students could share A-level/IB/AP notes and preparation materials. It wasn’t meant to be a startup or a business, it was just meant to be a helpful resource for our classmates and ourselves.
We explored different hosting options and eventually chose WordPress, as it was free, beginner-friendly, and allowed us to launch quickly without deep technical knowledge. At the time, we didn't really care about making it our own, we were just excited with sharing knowledge.
As soon as we had the idea, we jumped right into it and started building. We spent hours to set up a linux server on tencent cloud and eventually got to install wordpress. Every small visual improvement felt like huge progress. For the first time, I experienced the excitement of publishing something online and seeing others interact with it.
At its peak, the site reached around 1,000 daily active users. Students liked our notes, browsed resources, and registered. It stopped feeling like a school project and started feeling like a real product, we sometimes even dream of making it a full-time project.
Seeing people rely on something I helped build really changed my perception of what software could be.
But growth came with trade-offs.
To support more features, we added more plugins like a prebuilt forum or a user permission control system. Each plugin solved an immediate need. However, together they introduced too much complexity.
The site became slow(~4s for someone trying to access it). Conflicts between plugins happen all the time. Customizations grew fragile. And we had to spend more time fixing bugs than uploading new content.
For the first time, I noticed how technical decisions directly affected user experience. I read articles about it and realized that because of this our site actually lost many potential users.
That frustration sparked something deeper.
I began asking questions I hadn’t asked before:
WordPress had allowed me to build quickly, but it also shielded me from understanding the fundamentals. After look at all the prebuilt code and feel frustrated, I realized that I wanted to actually understand what I built instead of just use it as a black box. That was why I started learning web development from the ground up: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and backend concepts.
After I completed my university applications, I handed the platform over to the next leadership team. Eventually, they decided to shut it down.
But by then, the website had already fulfilled its purpose. It had reached thousands of students. It had solved a real problem. And more importantly, it had changed how I think about building software.
If that project taught me one thing, it is that technical choices are never purely technical.
Performance affects trust. Simplicity affects adoption. Design affects retention.
Since then, I have adopted a user-experience-first mindset. I care not only about whether a system functions, but whether it feels responsive, intuitive, and intentional. I’ve learned that engineering is not just about adding features, but about crafting an experience that users want to engage with.
AdvAlevel was not perfect. It was bloated, improvised, and full of beginner mistakes. But it was the project that transformed me from someone who used tools into someone who wants to understand and build systems.
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