Context
Austin Education is Victoria's top-performing VCE tutoring network: 21 ATAR 99.95 students in 2024, with in-house textbooks used by 80+ Victorian schools. They needed tooling that matched their academic rigor.
What I built
A full multi-tenant dashboard with four role flows. Students get a personalised homework queue and exam timeline; parents see live progress without logging into WeChat; tutors mark assignments with inline annotations and broadcast mock-exam results that fan out instantly to every subscribed client via Socket.io. Admins run the entire enrolment, attendance, and billing pipeline from a single console.
Decisions worth calling out
Choosing Recharts over a heavier lib like Highcharts kept the SSR path fast — a student loading their analytics page sees the first meaningful chart in under 400ms. WebSocket fan-out is scoped per tenant so a class of 30 getting their results doesn't spike anyone else's CPU. Authentication uses NextAuth with a custom MySQL adapter, letting us keep the 10k+ existing user records without a migration headache.
Outcome
Tutors report cutting ~5 hours of admin work per week. The academic team now makes curriculum decisions off live dashboards rather than end-of-term reports. Core Web Vitals improved ~40% site-wide and Austin's organic search traffic rose with the move off the legacy domain.