Learns App by CTD Labs

Breaking into tech is hard enough, but for people from underrepresented communities, the barriers start much earlier. Limited access to quality coding education means that a lot of talented people never get a fair shot at the opportunities the industry has to offer. That's the problem Learns App was built to address. Learns App is a free, web-based learning platform that reaches over 400 active students every day. It gives learners from underrepresented backgrounds access to real, comprehensive coding education, the kind that actually opens doors. One of the most meaningful things I worked on was helping migrate the platform's data layer from Airtable to MongoDB. The stakes were real. Our admin team had built five years of workflow on Airtable, we had hit the table limit. All of that data was at risk, and we had a year to rebuild it from scratch. I was one of the leading engineers on the internal admin dashboard we built to replace it, involved from the early planning conversations all the way through to shipping. I worked alongside the product manager and designers during the spec and wireframing phase. On the engineering side I helped shape decisions around technical design documents, state management, component architecture, and how we split module ownership across three engineers so we could move quickly without stepping on eachothers work. Under the hood, this is a production-grade application running Next.js, Node.js, MongoDB, and Redis. Every layer of the codebase is tested — units with Jest, components with Storybook, and complete user journeys with Playwright, leaving no gaps in the testing pyramid.