At AeroVia, we’re passionate about creating a platform that makes aerospace accessible, engaging, and structured. But what does it take to bring this vision to life? In this post, we’ll give you an inside look at how our platform is built, from the tools we use to the features we’ve designed.

The Foundation: A Platform Built for Learning

AeroVia is designed as a platform with courses, resources, forum and more to be an interactive way to explore the world of aerospace. I will first list all the features and then go in depth on how they are implemented.

• Multiple Learning Trees

Organize topics into structured, branching trees. Each tree serves as a roadmap, guiding learners step-by-step through progressively advanced content.

• Structured Courses

Each branch of the tree contains courses with modules and lessons to ensure the users build knowledge systematically. Interactive activities are included, like quizzes, external links, and built-in videos.

• Blog posts / Newsletter

Stay informed with our blogs/newsletter that complement the courses, offering insights, updates, and inspiration.

• Feedback

A feedback system helps us continuously improve the platform based on user input.

The Tech Stack: Powering AeroVia

Creating a platform with such depth requires a modern, scalable, and efficient tech stack. Here’s how we’ve approached it:

Core Technologies

• Frontend Framework: Next.js, fast, dynamic, and SEO-friendly pages for a great user experience.
• Database: Postgres, hosted on Supabase, handles our data storage.
• Database Interactions: Drizzle ORM, simplifies database interactions and maintenance.
• Deployment: Vercel, ensuring fast and reliable hosting with minimal downtime.
• User Authentication: Clerk, offering a seamless and secure login experience.
• File Management: Uploadthing, which simplifies how we manage media files.
• Styling: Tailwind CSS, to design a clean, responsive, and customizable interface.
• Analytics: Posthog, to better understand user behavior and improve the platform.

What’s Next?

We’re just getting started! Here are some exciting features we’re working on:

• Payments: Stripe, will enable a subscription model to access premium content and features.

How the whole platform is managed (Backend Website)

To write the courses, manage the resources, or manage the forum, we built a separate website for the staff. I will give you some behind-the-scenes views here.

Courses: There are many requirements for writing the courses, from moving the courses around, structuring the modules, all while having an intuitive interface for our course writers. Building a platform like AeroVia requires user-focused design. We're creating a space where aerospace enthusiasts can thrive by combining structured learning paths, interactive activities, and a clean interface.

Blog posts: To manage blog posts, there is an interface to write the content, publish, assign an author, and more. The interface is similar to the courses, but no need to work with a hierarchy like the courses need.

Resources: The platform is a central hub for resources and this means we have to manage all of those and make sure they are correct and up to date. This is why we have a separate interface for this. We manage everything here from the list of universities, companies or students teams, to the events coming up, summaries, and our public finances and roadmap.

Others: There are a lot of other pages for things like feedback (live from the website), logs (track changes made), statistics (users, courses written, contributions, ...), and more

The main website (aerovia.org)

I will not go in depth about how that one works and all the pages because you can explore it yourself. :)

Stay tuned as we continue to improve and expand AeroVia!