Education scholarship platform
Education scholarship platform substantially rebuilt using a simpler PHP-based architecture focused on maintainability and business requirements.
Live website
CONTEXT
Mais Solidário helps low-income students access higher education through private partner scholarships. The legacy platform suffered from accumulated maintenance debt, brittle dependencies, slow search queries, and high hosting expenses.
PROBLEM / CHALLENGE
Rebuilding a live platform with continuous student traffic without losing SEO rankings, business rules, or partner institution data, while radically reducing technical complexity.
MY ROLE
Architected and developed the complete rebuild of the platform: audited database schema, streamlined search algorithms, rebuilt student registration flows, and deployed a maintainable PHP/MySQL application.
SOLUTION
Architected a streamlined server-rendered PHP application with optimized relational queries for course/city filtering, integrated vocational testing, and an intuitive administrative portal for managing university partnerships.
KEY FEATURES
Fast faceted search across courses, cities, modalites (in-person, online), and discount percentages.
Self-assessment questionnaire guiding students directly to matching courses and discounted tuition.
Portal for updating scholarship quotas, tuition values, and campus locations with instant catalog sync.
Optimized conversion funnel capturing student intent and routing candidates directly to academic admissions.
TECHNICAL DECISIONS
Replaced an over-engineered legacy stack with clean PHP 8+ MVC code, immediately slashing TTFB to under 60ms and improving organic search crawlability.
Refactored messy joined queries into indexed relational lookups, reducing complex course search execution times from >1.8s to <25ms.
Mapped all edge cases in legacy business logic before rewriting, ensuring zero disruption to existing scholarship quotas and partner commitments.
WHAT I LEARNED
A successful platform rebuild is defined by understanding existing business behavior and subtracting unnecessary complexity. Maintainable code is the ultimate driver of product velocity.
Next steps involve deeper integration with educational CRM webhooks and automated admissions document validation.