StudySea is a study app built around the Pomodoro technique: study for a set block, say 25 minutes, then take a short break, and repeat. The difference is that you do it with friends. Everyone in a session shares the same timer, and the chat only opens during the breaks. While the timer’s running, there’s nothing to do but study.

What it does

• Plan study sessions as tasks, each with a subject, a start time, and how long the study blocks and breaks should be.
• Study together. Start a session, or join a friend’s, and everyone counts down together. You can join halfway through and still land on the same block as everyone else.
• Chat on the breaks, and only on the breaks.
• Post on a feed for your friends, with likes and comments. Finishing a session posts about it for you.
• Compete in leagues with friends, to see who studies the most, and see your own study time broken down by subject.

How it was made

It was our second-year team project at the University of Birmingham, built by seven of us over one semester, in three milestones: an idea with mockups, a working skeleton, and then the finished app with a demo video. Each of us owned part of it from end to end. Mine was the feed, with posts, likes, comments, reporting and deleting, and saving each study session once it’s over. I also built the settings pages. I was also in charge of the database and its migrations, and since I got the hang of Angular first, I made the shared components the rest of the team built their pages from.

It’s a JHipster app: Java and Spring Boot on the back end, Angular on the front, and PostgreSQL for the data. The chat is a separate little Node.js server, because that turned out easier than doing it in Spring.

It used to be live at studysea.live, but it isn’t online any more, so the pages above are rebuilt from its code, with made-up people in them. The post from the day we handed it in tells the story of building it.