College · 2023

Flywise

My final college project: making flight booking feel less like filing taxes.

The problem

Flight booking sites all seem designed by someone who has never been stressed at 11:52 PM trying to catch a 6 AM flight. Twelve tabs, five price differences, and a checkout flow that treats you like a suspect.

For my final college project I decided to build the version I actually wanted to use. The catch: it had to be defensible in front of two lecturers and a stopwatch.

What I built

• Search that respects you. One form, honest results, no "only 1 seat left!" theatrics.
• A booking flow with a spine. Choose, confirm, done. Three steps, all reversible until they shouldn't be.
• Admin side included. Flights, prices, and bookings — managed from the same app, because context-switching is a tax too.

What went wrong (and got fixed)

The fare logic and I had disagreements. Turns out "price changes while the user hesitates" is a feature airlines need, not a bug I can ignore. I learned to model it properly instead of praying users click fast.

What I'd tell past me

Ship the boring database design first. Every hour spent on indexes early paid for itself the night before the demo.