Dental school: $250,000
Dental school materials: $20,000
Room and Board: $130,000
Not to mention miscellaneous costs and surprises like a blown car transmission and medical bills to name a few.
When I first heard these numbers from someone close to me applying to dental school as an international dentist, I couldn't believe what I was seeing - $400,000.
And, after she already paid her $1,300 exam bill, she needed to find a way to scrape together another $500 for advanced prep study tools that expire in 6 months. That's when I saw an opportunity to build Teefs Prep.
The INBDE is a standardize exam that evaluates a candidate's clinical judgment, problem-solving skills, and scientific knowledge to safely practice entry-level dentistry.
Teefs Prep is a completely free for dental students and simulates INBDE style questions, generated by AI. I'm first and foremost a software engineer, but formerly an educator and avid studier. I built everything students need to get a free boost in their studies while paving the road for growth, and improvement along the way.
https://www.teefsprep.com
I made a theme for memorial day 🇺🇸
Skip to https://www.teefsprep.com/ to checkout it out. Select the theme in the menu bar - it’s only available today and tomorrow 😃 🇺🇸
Some technicals 👨💻
I could have just shoved a new library into my package and signed up for another cloud service. I first attempted a few other services like Launch Darkly and Flipt. They were easy to set up, not terribly expensive but I felt like my app would be turning into a package nightmare the more I relied on other services. I don't need percentage rollouts, user segments, or a whole flag platform. I just needed to know: is this theme available in prod, and only during the holiday window?
So, I built the boring version. It's a boolean flag in Supabase, dev vs prod gating, optional start/end dates, and a simple admin toggle in the app. The flag doesn't auto-apply the theme, it just adds Memorial Day 🇺🇸 to the picker.
There are some tradeoffs, for one it ended up costing me a whole day to build out the feature, test, and make some improvements. But now I’m set up to make more custom themes.
Are non-minimalistic icons back?
Discomorphism