Campus Blink

Project overview

MAIT\'s campus had no shared infrastructure for the small, constant transactions students handle every day — secondhand textbooks, canteen orders, stationery runs between classes. Campus Blink set out to fix that with one MERN-stack platform covering three needs at once.

1. Peer-to-peer trading — students list, browse, and trade secondhand items directly with each other
2. Canteen pre-ordering — skip the lunch-line queue by ordering ahead from campus vendors
3. Stationery delivery — on-demand delivery for last-minute academic essentials
4. A vendor-facing dashboard — giving canteen and stationery vendors a simple way to manage incoming orders

Project execution

Built solo on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js), Campus Blink went from concept to live product fast enough to start onboarding real users within weeks — both students using the marketplace and canteen vendors fielding pre-orders.

The plan broke down at the hardware layer, not the software layer. Canteen vendors had no POS systems — they were running every transaction off personal phones — and the college wasn\'t willing to fund proper equipment. No amount of additional code could fix a problem that lived entirely outside the app.

Project results

Campus Blink proved the demand was real — students and vendors adopted it within weeks of launch, with zero existing alternative on campus. But a product built on infrastructure that can\'t be funded isn\'t a product that should keep running on hope. I made the call to sunset it rather than prop up a broken foundation.

• Real adoption from day one — no incentives, no paid acquisition, just genuine campus demand
• Diagnosed the actual blocker (hardware, not code) instead of patching around it indefinitely
• Open-sourced the entire codebase on GitHub instead of letting a working product disappear