THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. DESCRIPTION IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

Bravo Langues

Back when I worked at Centrall, I met some amazing co-workers. Raph was one of them, and he hit me up for web design work. His mom, Alice, runs a language school called Bravo Langues, and they needed a complete revamp.

I handled everything—UI/UX design, full development, and setting up Moodle to replace some overpriced, clunky learning management system they were using.

Design

I took inspiration from local agencies that go for bold, clean designs and built a layout with stacked, rounded blocks. Originally, I wanted to keep it soft with pastel colors, but Alice preferred something with more pop—blue, green, and red.

The idea was to make the school feel modern and legit, without looking like some generic government-funded e-learning platform. There’s a fine line between looking professional and being too corporate to the point of losing personality.

To keep things balanced, I mixed strong colors and stock images. I like using stock photos with a dark overlay for important info, while bright, solid color blocks are perfect for call-to-action sections (like featured courses or the About Us page).

Smarter Course Search

Most website search bars suck. People type random stuff, hoping the system magically figures out what they meant, but that rarely happens. A lot of it comes down to bad UX and developers not caring about how people actually search.

Instead of going with basic search tools like Elasticsearch or Algolia, I self-hosted Typesense—a faster, more efficient open-source alternative.

I learned this the hard way at Centrall, where I led the dev for a sneaker marketplace. We had a massive sneaker database built from user submissions and automated crawling, and search needed to be fast—think StockX-level performance. We started with Algolia, which worked great but got ridiculously expensive (some people pay over $60K a year for it). After testing Typesense, it gave us the same results for way cheaper, so I went with that for Bravo Langues too, self hosting it on a VPS.

The Tech Stack

Since this site needed both eCommerce and course management, Next.js was the obvious choice. It’s fast, flexible, and perfect for handling payments and dynamic content.

Automating Moodle

At university, I remember signing up for classes last minute and then waiting forever because the professor had to manually add me to the system. Super annoying.

I didn’t want Bravo Langues students to deal with the same nonsense, so I automated everything with Moodle’s API. Now, as soon as someone signs up for a class, they get auto-enrolled, and an email with all their course details and login info is sent instantly. No delays, no waiting for someone to "approve" them.