🚀 Rethinking University Administration – My Study Project “Proftime”
By Malte Budig – April 21, 2025
Planning and accounting for teaching workloads at universities is often a paperwork nightmare – confusing, error-prone, and time-consuming. This is exactly where my study project comes in: Proftime is a modern, web-based application that digitizes and simplifies the management of teaching assignments, courses, and accounting processes for academic staff.
In this blog post, I’ll share how I used modern tools like React, TanStack, Keycloak & Co. to build a scalable system with thoughtful architecture and real practical value.
🎯 The Goal: Less Excel, More Clarity
The system was built with two core user groups in mind:
- Professors: Plan courses, submit teaching loads, and manage accounting
- Deans: Oversee faculty planning, approvals, and manage workload reductions
My goal was to create a system that is intuitive, modular, maintainable, and secure – making everyday university processes simpler and more efficient.
🧱 The Tech Stack: Modern, Modular, Robust
The application is built on a React frontend with TypeScript and a Spring Boot REST API on the backend. Key technologies in the frontend include:
- TanStack Router & Query – modern, type-safe routing and data fetching
- Shadcn UI – flexible, highly customizable UI components
- React Hook Form + Zod – type-safe form validation
- i18next – for internationalization from the start
- Keycloak – secure login and role-based access control
The architecture was designed to be modular, with Docker-based development environments and structured component/scheme management.
🧑💻 UX & Features: Efficient, Accessible, Thoughtful
Focus was placed on usability:
- Clear UI with sidebar, header, and contextual action bars
- Role-based views (Professor vs. Dean)
- Reusable, editable tables
- Dialogs and forms with validation and accessibility
- Full multilingual support from day one
- Typed, structured data filtering and logic
Thanks to a role-based access control system (RBAC), users only see what's relevant to them – ensuring clarity and data security.
🧪 Quality & Scalability
The system was designed with a strong focus on testing and future extensibility:
- Modular, typed components
- Unit and integration tests
- Centralized types and validation schemas using Zod
- Clear separation between logic, structure, and styling
Looking ahead: CI/CD integration, end-to-end testing, and accessibility improvements (WCAG).
✨ Conclusion: A Digital Boost for University Workflows
Proftime replaces an outdated email-based system with a smart solution that digitizes planning and accounting processes in an intuitive, efficient, and future-proof way. It also lays a solid foundation for future features such as approval workflows, exports, and automated reports.
My key learning: When tech meets real user needs, it creates software that truly helps.
Note: Proftime is a university-internal project, so the source code and live application are not publicly available (I no longer have access to the internal environment). The screenshots above are from the running system.