PPDB Surabaya

I joined PPDB Surabaya after being invited by a senior from my university to participate in the development of the city's elementary school admission platform. This became my first professional project where I worked entirely as a Frontend Engineer alongside experienced engineers, university lecturers, and government stakeholders. As a newcomer to a production-scale project, I invested significant time understanding the existing codebase, project architecture, coding conventions, and engineering workflow before contributing features. Since AI-assisted development tools were not yet common, every implementation was written and reviewed manually, which greatly strengthened my understanding of React, TypeScript, and Redux. This project became one of the most valuable learning experiences early in my software engineering career.

My responsibilities extended beyond frontend development. Throughout the project, I participated in meetings with government stakeholders, university lecturers, and the internal engineering team three times each week to discuss development progress, review completed work, report bugs, and plan upcoming releases. On the engineering side, I was responsible for: • Maintaining and improving existing frontend modules • Developing new features and fixing production bugs • Integrating frontend applications with backend APIs • Revamping the landing page • Improving registration form reliability • Implementing geolocation-based zoning to automatically determine the applicant's district, subdistrict, and available schools based on their current location The zoning feature significantly simplified the registration process by automatically recommending schools within the applicant's eligible admission zone.

During the official enrollment opening, the engineering team monitored the system overnight from 12:00 AM until 6:00 AM to ensure the registration platform remained stable while thousands of users submitted applications. My responsibility was to monitor the frontend application, verify that every registration flow worked correctly, respond quickly to issues reported by users or stakeholders, and deploy bug fixes whenever necessary to minimize service disruption. The platform successfully supported more than 20,000 elementary school applicants throughout the 2023 admission period. Beyond the technical experience, this project taught me how production systems are operated, how engineering teams collaborate with government stakeholders, and how software reliability becomes critical when building applications used directly by the public.