Skills Boost Next

What it does

Skills Boost Next lets a learner search and filter a catalogue of free online courses, follow an AI-generated learning pathway that strings several courses together toward a goal, track progress and earn badges, and ask an in-app AI assistant for help navigating what to learn next. On the other side, an administrator gets a CMS for managing providers, courses, categories, skills and pathways, including uploading and hosting novel courses with SCORM packages.

How it works

The catalogue, pathways and progress tracking sit on a Prisma/Postgres schema. All query logic is isolated in a services layer so no page component talks to Prisma directly. AI features (pathway generation and the learning assistant) run through OpenRouter, and degrade gracefully rather than erroring when no API key is configured.

The interesting problem

The project was originally built against SQLite for local development, which worked fine locally but broke on deploying to Vercel. On Vercel, the SQLite database file can be built successfully but not reliably written to at runtime. Migrating to a hosted Postgres database and running prisma migrate deploy fixed the issue.

Stack and why

Next.js’s App Router and a services layer keep data access out of page components, which made the SQLite-to-Postgres migration a schema and config change rather than a rewrite. OpenRouter was chosen to allow model hot-swapping with an environment variable rather than a code change—this was useful for a demo prototype that needed to run cheaply and efficiently.

What I would do differently

This is an effective demonstrator, but should’ve been constructed with genuine rather than seeded course, to better demonstrate the app’s utility to policy officials.