I build the software a college runs on.
A learning management system used daily by students, lecturers and administrators, two admissions websites with their own staff dashboards, and a tuition-academy platform. Designed, built, deployed and maintained end to end.
Four platforms, all in production.
Each one replaced spreadsheets, paper forms or a dated site for a real education business. The screenshots below were captured from the live sites and from local builds of the code.
Aspire College LMS
Learning management system · 3 portalsNext.js 16 · Prisma · PostgreSQLAspire College website
Admissions site, AI assistant, staff dashboardNext.js · Cloudflare D1 + R2Aspire Academy
Tuition platform with student & admin portalsReact 19 · Supabase · VercelAspire Campus
International online admissions & paymentsReact · Express · StripeAspire College LMS
One system for the whole academic year at a Pearson BTEC college: timetables, attendance, assignment drafts, marking, results release and lecture recordings. Every submission and result passes through an admin approval step before anyone else sees it, which is how the college runs its quality assurance.
lms.aspirecollege.lkApproval-first workflow
Draft 1 → Draft 2 → Final for Pearson units. Admin approves submissions before marking and approves grades before release, with a live pipeline view per student.
Class allocation to timetable
Admins allocate sessions per batch and semester; lecturer and student timetables, calendars and printable PDFs generate from that one source.
QR and Teams attendance
Lecturers open a short-lived QR code in class. Online students are matched from the Teams attendance report, with a reconcile screen for names that don't match.
Recordings with access rules
Class recordings unlock for students who attended; others request access and admins decide. Playback uses signed, heartbeat-checked sessions.
Security built in
Role checks in the route proxy and again in every server action, per-request CSP nonces, account lockout after repeated failed sign-ins, forced password change.
A dashboard students open
Aspire Buddy check-ins, learning streaks and a joke of the day sit next to the next class and due work. Distress messages raise a private alert for staff.
Inside the LMS
The live LMS holds real student records, so these screens come from a local build of the same code running on a fictional demo cohort. The sign-in page is captured from the live site.
Aspire College website
A rebuild of the college's public site around one job: turn a visitor into an application. Aviation is the college's signature, so the design borrows from airports — a split-flap departure board in the hero, programmes listed as departures, and a boarding-pass level finder that tells applicants where their current qualifications let them enter.
aspirecollege.lk
Data-driven catalogue
One courses file generates every category page and course page. Adding a programme is a data entry, never a new route.
Captain Aspi, the AI assistant
A chat assistant built on Claude answers programme questions and hands warm leads to admissions as call-back requests.
Applications with documents
A three-step application uploads certificates to private storage. Staff review everything in an admissions dashboard behind password plus authenticator code.
Aspire Academy
Marketing site and student platform for an IGCSE and A Level tuition academy in Colombo 07. Parents compare subjects and prices, book a free demo class on WhatsApp, and browse exam results; students sign in with Google to a dashboard, and staff manage content from an admin panel.
aspireacademy.com.lk
Location-aware pricing
An IP lookup shows Sri Lankan visitors local rates and overseas visitors international rates for group and individual classes.
Results gallery
Exam results filter by level, subject, year and board, with live totals for A*, A and B grades.
Portals on Supabase
Email or Google sign-in, enrolments and a student dashboard, plus an admin dashboard for the academy team.
Aspire Campus
A Singapore-registered online campus selling two UK HNDs to students anywhere. The single-page site runs the whole funnel: enquiry, online application with ID and certificate uploads, a Stripe application fee, then a Student ID and portal access for accepted students. Staff work from a separate admin dashboard.
aspirecollege.online
Layered API
Routes, controllers, services and repositories for enquiries, applications, blog and students, validated with Zod and hardened with Helmet and CORS.
Payments and onboarding
Application and course fees through Stripe with webhook confirmation; staff issue Student IDs and portal logins from the dashboard.
Found by AI search
JSON-LD for the organisation and both courses, plus an llms.txt file so assistants describe the programmes accurately.
What I reach for, and where it shipped.
Tags show which of the four projects above uses each tool in production, so nothing here is a line I added to look complete.
I work inside the business I build for, so the software starts from how the college actually runs.
I'm Varrshan Sureshkumar, Director of Aspire Academy and operations coordinator at Aspire College of Higher Education in Colombo, and the developer behind their platforms. Day to day I see where admissions leak, where lecturers lose time and where students get stuck, and I turn that into features.
I'm also studying a Bachelor of Information Technology (Data Science) at Macquarie University, and I take on freelance web projects. I build with Claude Code as a pair programmer, which lets one person ship and maintain systems of this size.
- 01Sit with the people who will use it and map the real process first.
- 02Model the data, then design the screens around the decisions people make.
- 03Ship early to one programme or one batch, then roll out.
- 04Stay on support: fix, measure, and keep improving after launch.
Need a platform, not just a page?
I take on learning platforms, admissions sites, admin dashboards and internal tools. Tell me what the process looks like today and I'll tell you how I'd build it.