Yesterday I started a mentor role with University of Florida’s Spark – Engineering Innovation Institute. Instead of just adding ongoing notes to a hulking doc that no one would find very useful (or probably even read), I decided that a clean online interface was the only way to manage 25+ ongoing conversations while providing value AND not killing my personal time since I have only dedicated 90-120mins a week to this project. So after our first session I spent 45 minutes vibe coding a platform to keep track of future session notes, as well as a place to share resources with the student teams. And all it costs is a $20/mo Claude subscription!
How did I do it?
- Before our first session I spent 30 minutes chatting with Claude, gathering research on all the departments and resources inside UF, as well as local Gainesville organizations that could make for good collaborative potential.
- I added those research docs to a new Claude Cowork project folder, along with the spreadsheet spark had provided me with, including basic details on all the startups
- Claude made me a nicely organized document with a long list of all the startups that might attend my sessions. I knew this would help bring me immediately up to speed on the all, no matter who attended (without me needlessly doing a huge amount of homework)
- After the call I dropped the raw transcript into the project folder, and asked Claude Cowork to help me build some sort of interface that featured: The startup list, individual startup pages, UF and local resources, plus useful AI tools. Within about 20 minutes a clickable V1 tool was complete and immediately working on my local machine. Another 20 minutes after that and I’d worked out some style tweaks. A little more after that and I’d added unique passwords to each startup’s page for privacy.
- Finally I spent 5 minutes connecting it to GitHub and published it to a Netlify link (both at zero cost free) so they students could access their (password protected) notes, peruse resources, and info from transcripts.. Now I can use this as an ongoing UI for future sessions.
What previously would have been a messy, time consuming, out of date, unstructured doc, became us useful, interactive app in under and hour.
Wild times!
