EngBusters

Myth or fact? EngBusters lets UW students vote, discuss, and settle it

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p269chen@uwaterloo.ca l48cai@uwaterloo.ca e4sze@uwaterloo.ca

Inspiration

Waterloo Engineering is full of rumors and “upper-year wisdom.” On UWflow, one user says the course is a bird couse while another says it's the hardest course they've taken; which one should you trust? We wanted to turn that into something fun and useful by creating a place where students can challenge myths with real votes and firsthand experiences.

What it does

EngBusters is a social myth-busting platform for Waterloo Engineering students. Users can submit myths, vote True or False, add comments/testimonials, and view community-driven verdict trends across buildings, courses, and professors.

How we built it

We built EngBusters with a React + TypeScript + Vite frontend and Vercel Serverless Functions backend. We used Firebase Admin + Firestore for persistence/auth-related flows, Zod for API validation, and deployed everything to Vercel with production aliasing.

Challenges we ran into

We hit several production issues: ESM import/runtime mismatches, CORS preflight/header problems, environment variable pitfalls, Firestore setup gaps, and frontend/backend schema mismatches. We also had to coordinate merges across multiple branches/worktrees while keeping production stable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We shipped an end-to-end platform with working myth submission, voting, and discussion in production. We also delivered a polished reels-like feed UX, category-aware submission flow, branch integration into main, and cleaner username display in comments.

What we learned

We learned that deployment health checks are as important as deployment success, CORS/header consistency can make or break apps, and strict API contracts between frontend/backend save a lot of debugging time. We also learned to move fast while balancing product polish and reliability.

What's next for EngBusters

Next, we want to add stronger identity/profile support, better moderation tools, richer trending/ranking logic, deeper analytics by building/program/course, and real-time updates/notifications to make discussions more engaging.

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