Aquário

Every new student at UFPB's Centro de Informática shows up with the same problem: nobody can quite tell you what's going on. Guides are scattered across PDFs from years past. Labs you'll only hear about by accident. Leagues, research groups, internship lists, prerequisite charts, the official academic calendar — all real, all useful, all somewhere else. By the time you've found half of it, the semester is over.

Aquário is the platform I started to fix that. The idea was simple: pull everything the center cares about into one site, keep it open, and let the students who actually use it own the data. Not a top-down portal handed down by the administration. A hub built by the CI community, for the CI community, in public.

Today the platform carries course-specific guides for every degree at the center, the full curriculum grid with prerequisite tracking, class schedules, an interactive map of the building (so freshmen stop wandering the wrong floors), the official academic calendar, a directory of every active lab, league, and student entity, and a job/internship board. A sister scraper pulls curriculum data straight from SIGAA — the university's notoriously hard-to-read system — and turns it into something readable.

It runs on Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind with shadcn/ui, and Postgres with Prisma. MIT licensed. Six repos under the aquario-ufpb GitHub organization, with separate codebases for the guides, the maps, the contributor stats, and the SIGAA scraper. Anyone in the center can open a PR — that was the whole point. Most of our 15+ contributors are students who pushed their first PR ever into Aquário.

We launched officially on March 10, 2026, after months of building in the open. The day-one release shipped guides, entities, the curriculum grid, class schedules, room maps, and the calendar. Within the first weeks: 300+ users, 80 GitHub stars, 689 commits, v1.8.0. Project listings and a richer opportunities feed are next.

The pitch I keep coming back to: nobody else was going to do this. The center has too much going on and too little coordination for the information chaos to fix itself. So we built the fix and gave it away.

Live at aquarioufpb.com. Code at github.com/aquario-ufpb.