📚TokenStudies

TokenStudies is a learning platform that helps university students find study notes faster and review what they know more effectively — so exam preparation starts with studying, not searching.

The problem

Around exam weeks, useful notes are scattered across chat groups, shared drives and photographed notebooks. Finding the right material for a specific course often takes longer than studying it, and there is no structured way to come back and review what you have already covered.

Why I built it

As a student I watched this play out every semester, including in my own routine. I wanted a single, organized place where materials are attached to the right course and reviewing feels intentional rather than accidental.

Technical architecture

TokenStudies is a Python web application built with Flask. Data lives in PostgreSQL and is accessed through SQLAlchemy, with the schema organized around courses and the study materials that belong to them. Keeping the model relational makes course-scoped search and listing straightforward, and Flask keeps the request/response cycle explicit and easy to reason about.

Flask's minimalism was a deliberate choice: the framework hides very little, so every route, query and rendering decision stays visible and debuggable. SQLAlchemy sits between the application and PostgreSQL as the single description of the schema, which keeps the database layer honest as the model grows instead of drifting away from the code.

Challenges and what I learned

The main challenge was schema design: deciding how courses, materials and their metadata relate so the platform can grow without painful migrations later.

Working in Flask after JavaScript-heavy projects also taught me a different discipline — explicit routing, server-side decisions, and managing database sessions correctly with SQLAlchemy. TokenStudies rounded out my backend fundamentals in a second ecosystem.

It is also where I practiced thinking in terms of information architecture rather than features: how does a student get from "I have an exam on Thursday" to the exact note they need, in as few steps as possible? Starting from that moment of need instead of from the data model changed the design — and it is a framing I have carried into every project since.