Chilotiene.io
07 June 2025
A platform for sharing reviews on courses at the University of Trento. Courses are retrieved and updated automatically from the university’s website. Find it on chilotiene.io.
The platform is built using SvelteKit. It allows students to share their experiences and opinions on various courses, helping others make informed decisions about their studies.
There are some existing review platforms, but they tend to gatekeep information, limiting access to enrolled students, hiding details behind logins or asking for personal information. I just built what I needed: an open information website where course reviews are freely accessible to anyone, with authenticated functions being completely optional and without any drawbacks for simple guests. The idea was inspired mostly by EPFL CourseFinder, but in general it was mostly an excuse to build something useful for myself and my fellow colleagues.
I also took the opportunity to experiment with some modern web technologies. The site is built with Svelte, and I explored cross-page transitions using the latest CSS and JavaScript APIs now supported in browsers. It was both a practical and enjoyable way to dive into new frontend tools while solving a real problem.
It is currently a work in progress. I plan to add and polish more features. For now, registering offers really no benefits, and password change is not even implemented yet.
A few things are really still to polish, for example:
- Every time data is pulled from the university’s website, it is merged with the current data, and history is kept. But reviews are always overwritten, unfortunately.
- Some courses still fail to retrieve the professor(s’) name(s) from the university’s website, so they are not displayed.
I had a bit of fun with transitions:
You can see it for yourself at chilotiene.io.