From Inquiry to Achievement

A few weeks ago, two of my former teaching assistants, Olivia Xie and Haoning Wang, reached out to me. They were looking for more hands-on experience and wondered if I had any projects in mind. Their timing couldn’t have been better.

Just a few days earlier, I’d been playing around with Hugo, trying to set up a static website to showcase Northeastern’s capstone projects. With Copilot and ChatGPT on hand, it was fun -- until I hit a snag. I wanted to integrate a CMS, but I hadn’t decided which one to use. That’s when Olivia and Haoning came into the picture.

I asked them if they were up for the challenge: choose a headless CMS, integrate it with the site, and polish the design. Without hesitation, they said yes.

Fast forward a week, and they came back with a fully functional website, integrated with Sanity as the CMS. They didn’t just meet expectations -- they exceeded them. We sat down to discuss the next steps: adding filters, pagination, and a few other features.

But Olivia and Haoning weren’t satisfied with just getting the job done. They wanted more. They volunteered to rebuild the entire application in React, keeping the headless CMS in place. And they delivered.

As the Northeastern University Vancouver Capstone showcase approached, they worked tirelessly, collaborating with Dennis Chenard to squash bugs, refine features, and even make the site mobile-friendly -- all in one weekend. They pulled it off, and the result was impressive.

What struck me most wasn’t just their technical skills, though those were undoubtedly on display. It was their proactive attitude. They didn’t wait for opportunities to come to them -- they sought them out, took ownership, and delivered beyond what anyone expected.

Olivia and Haoning turned a simple inquiry into a significant achievement. They didn’t just ask for a project -- they owned it, transformed it, and made it something to be proud of.

https://capstone.vankhoury.dev/