Sumit Kumar - Projects

For our Software Engineering course, our team built the Online Classroom Management System (OCMS) from a blank repo - a platform where teachers and students manage classes, assignments, and lectures without juggling five different tools to do it.

The system splits cleanly into two halves. The frontend is React with Redux for global state, styled with Tailwind to move fast without hand-writing a wall of CSS. The backend is Node.js and Express backed by MongoDB, handling authentication, course data, and assignment submissions through REST routes scoped around users, courses, and assignments - with role-based access control so a student and a teacher genuinely see different things.

Where the actual friction was

Redux's global state was the first real wall - specifically getting async calls (fetching a course, submitting an assignment, refreshing after an edit) to update state predictably instead of racing each other. On the backend, designing APIs that were both secure and efficient took several passes; the first version was neither.

Tailwind, by contrast, was a genuine speed multiplier - styling a full multi-role UI without drowning in custom CSS files freed up time to spend on the state-management and API problems that actually mattered.

We shipped both halves on Vercel - frontend and backend - which turned out to be as much a lesson in deployment plumbing as in the application code itself. Between the role-based access model, the async state headaches, and shipping two separately-deployed services that had to agree with each other, this was less "a CRUD app" and more a real dry run of how full-stack teams actually ship software.