Nexus AI

Nexus AI is a student career operating system for ambitious college students. It brings applications, certifications, projects, networking, interview preparation, resume notes, goals, and coaching into one organized dashboard.

Project status: active portfolio product and startup exploration.

Demo Walkthrough

Live Demo

Open Nexus AI

Full-stack version:

Open Nexus AI with Render backend

Backend health check:

https://nexus-ai-api-upkl.onrender.com/health

What It Does

Nexus AI helps students manage the full career-building process instead of tracking everything across scattered notes, spreadsheets, and tabs. It is built around repeatable workflows: apply, follow up, improve skills, prepare for interviews, update projects, and monitor progress over time.

Features

• Personalized career readiness dashboard
• Priority Alerts panel that surfaces overdue items, thin pipelines, deadline windows, missing proof links, and role-fit gaps
• Recent Activity timeline so the workspace feels like a living career system instead of static storage
• Working FastAPI + SQLite backend in backend/
• Frontend automatically connects to the hosted Render backend on GitHub Pages
• One-click recruiter sample workspace with realistic applications, projects, skills, goals, and resume notes
• Backend health-check timeout and request timeout handling so the app quickly falls back to local mode when an API is unavailable
• Guided onboarding flow that turns a student's target role, major, timeline, and weekly hours into a first action plan
• First-time empty workspaces open directly into onboarding
• Built-in product case study view explaining the problem, system design, evidence, and startup roadmap
• Rule-based resume feedback with a resume strength score and targeted bullet recommendations
• Editable internship application tracker with search and status filtering
• Certification tracker with progress monitoring
• Project portfolio tracker with links, tech stacks, and impact notes
• Networking CRM with follow-up dates and context notes
• Interview prep tracker with role-specific practice prompts
• Resume notes and resume coaching checklist
• Semester career goals
• AI-style coaching generated from live workspace data
• More specific coaching based on deadlines, skill gaps, project proof gaps, low-progress goals, and target-role alignment
• Weekly career plan generator with priorities, reasons, time estimates, and due timing
• Upcoming deadline timeline
• Pipeline analytics
• Career profile setup
• Skill inventory with proof-backed confidence scoring
• Target-role skill gap analysis
• Database-ready workspace schema preview
• Downloadable SQL schema for backend/database planning
• Backend endpoints for workspace data, readiness analytics, and skill-gap analysis
• Self-healing SQLite schema initialization for safer cold starts and tests
• Workspace reset and JSON snapshot import through the API
• Downloadable career action plan
• Copyable weekly action plan
• Local browser persistence with localStorage
• Importable and exportable JSON snapshots
• Downloadable resume notes
• Blank workspace reset

Tech Stack

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Browser localStorage
• Python
• FastAPI
• SQLite

What This Project Shows

• Product thinking for student productivity and career management
• Dashboard UX design for repeated daily use
• Local data persistence and import/export workflows
• Backend API design for career-workspace data
• Relational database modeling with SQLite
• Auth and PostgreSQL upgrade planning for multi-user persistence
• Full-stack integration between a JavaScript dashboard and FastAPI service
• Skill gap analysis tied to target roles
• Prioritized action planning from applications, projects, skills, goals, and deadlines
• Database schema planning for a future backend
• Systems analysis across applications, skills, networking, and goals

Portfolio Materials

• Demo script
• Roadmap
• Ready-to-create GitHub issues
• LinkedIn post draft
• Architecture
• Deployment guide
• Auth and PostgreSQL upgrade plan
• Demo video script
• Security policy
• Privacy notes
• Contribution guide
• Changelog

Case Study

Problem

College students often manage career preparation across disconnected tools: job boards, notes apps, spreadsheets, resumes, project folders, and calendar reminders. This makes it difficult to see whether they are actually becoming more internship-ready over time.

Solution

Nexus AI centralizes the student career workflow into one dashboard. It helps users track applications, certifications, projects, networking, interviews, resume notes, goals, and skills while generating career-readiness signals from the workspace data.

Key Design Decisions

• Started with a blank user workspace so each student builds their own profile
• Routed empty workspaces into onboarding so first-time users know what to do first
• Used localStorage so the app works as a deployable static product on GitHub Pages
• Added a separate FastAPI backend so the project can evolve into a full-stack product without breaking the static demo
• Added Priority Alerts and Recent Activity to make the dashboard feel live and action-oriented
• Added skill-gap analysis so the dashboard does more than store information
• Included a SQL schema export to show how the product could evolve into a backend/database system

What I Learned

This project strengthened my understanding of product design, state management, user workflows, and systems analysis. It also helped me think about how career preparation can be modeled as connected data instead of isolated tasks.

Future Improvements

• Implement Clerk authentication using the documented auth plan
• Move saved workspace data from SQLite into PostgreSQL using backend/postgres_schema.sql
• Add user accounts and role-based access controls
• Connect CareerLens AI recommendations directly into the Nexus AI skills plan
• Harden the hosted backend for production authentication, rate limits, and PostgreSQL persistence
• Add frontend test coverage

How To Run

Open index.html in a browser.

No installation is required.

Backend API

The backend is optional for the GitHub Pages demo, but it is included for the full-stack version of the project.

cd backend
python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python seed.py
uvicorn main:app --reload

Then open:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs

Run the frontend at the same time:

cd ..
python -m http.server 8070

Then open:

http://127.0.0.1:8070/

When the backend is running, the app shows API connected and stores workspace data in SQLite. On GitHub Pages, it safely falls back to browser localStorage.

To connect the live GitHub Pages frontend to a deployed backend, open:

https://jasonbinong.github.io/Nexus-AI/?api=https://nexus-ai-api-upkl.onrender.com

See Deployment Guide for Render setup.

API Endpoints

Method	Endpoint	Purpose
GET	/health	Verify API status, version, configured origins, and available collections
GET	/snapshot	Return the full workspace: profile, collections, resume notes, activity, analytics, and skill gaps
GET	/analytics/readiness	Return readiness score and target-role skill gap analysis
PUT	/profile	Update target role, major, graduation, and weekly focus hours
PUT	/resume	Update saved resume notes
GET	/{collection}	List records for applications, certifications, projects, skills, networking, interviews, or goals
POST	/{collection}	Create a record in a workspace collection
PUT	/{collection}/{item_id}	Edit a record in a workspace collection
DELETE	/{collection}/{item_id}	Delete a record from a workspace collection
POST	/workspace/import	Import a JSON workspace snapshot
DELETE	/workspace/reset	Clear the workspace and start fresh

Supported collections: applications, certifications, projects, skills, networking, interviews, and goals.

To verify the SQLite schema before installing API dependencies:

cd backend
python smoke_test.py

To test the API contract after installing dependencies:

pytest test_api_contract.py