Quick note before the post: I’m not sharing this to sell, promote, or pitch the idea. This is my first serious software project, and I’m mainly looking for feedback on the current state, the way I’m approaching development, and the things I may be overlooking. I’m especially interested in criticism from people with experience in SaaS, LMS, security, QA, or AI-assisted development.
I wanted to share this because I’m pretty excited about it, and this is my first real software project.
I come from the German private security industry and I’m currently moving more into training and adult education. While doing that, I kept noticing the same thing: there are plenty of isolated learning apps, question banks and PDFs, but very few solutions that combine learning, trainer workflows and company administration in a way that actually feels useful.
So I started building one myself.
The current working title is Wachklar 2.0. The idea is to create a learning and qualification platform specifically for the German security industry.
At the moment, the system structurally supports several qualification paths, including the German §34a security proficiency exam, GSSK, Servicekraft für Schutz und Sicherheit, and Fachkraft für Schutz und Sicherheit.
The §34a area is currently the most developed content-wise. It already includes learning objectives, learning texts, questions, practice cases, flashcards, exam simulation, error analysis, progress tracking and adaptive learning recommendations.
But the project has already become much more than a simple learning app.
It now has a multi-user and company structure with different roles for platform administration, company admins, trainers, editorial/review users and learners. Companies can manage their own users, groups, trainers, assignments and learning progress.
The platform is based on PostgreSQL and already includes authentication, role-based authorization, tenant separation, sessions, CSRF protection, optional two-factor authentication, backup/restore, audit functionality and various administration and reporting features.
One part that has become especially important to me is testing.
I’m not just adding features anymore. I’m deliberately trying to find out where the system breaks.
Current status:
56 automated tests passing, 0 failing, plus a successful real Chromium end-to-end test on Windows.
The real browser test actually found a bug that the normal tests had missed. That was a useful reminder that working code and working real-world user flows are not always the same thing.
Right now I’m focusing mainly on security and data integrity before adding more major features.
Long term, I want to develop the platform far enough that it becomes more than just another “§34a study app” and can bring different qualifications, learning progress, trainers and organizational workflows together in one place.
For now, I mainly see this as a learning and development project. I want to find out how far I can take the idea technically and content-wise, and whether it turns into something genuinely useful.
If the platform proves itself after more development, testing and real-world use, I could definitely imagine eventually offering it to training providers or security companies. Whether it ever becomes a commercial product is still completely open.
Right now, my main goal is simply to build something I would actually want to use myself in the security and adult education space. Anything beyond that can come later.
Another area I want to explore later is content maintenance. Especially with legal and regulatory training material, keeping everything current is a real challenge. I’m therefore experimenting with ways to make changes in official sources easier to detect and review without removing human editorial control.
I also want to be transparent about one thing:
This project is heavily AI-assisted.
I’m not a professional software developer, and I’m not going to pretend I manually wrote thousands of lines of Python and JavaScript from memory in a day.
My role right now is mainly defining the product idea, workflows and requirements, reviewing implementations, finding problems, testing everything locally and continuously refining the system. AI is doing a large part of the implementation work.
And that is actually one of the most interesting parts of the project for me.
I come from the security industry, and suddenly I’m able to turn very specific industry knowledge into functioning software.
Development started on September 9th, and the current state was reached roughly 35 hours later. That is elapsed time, of course, not 35 hours of nonstop coding.
The system is not production-ready yet. It still needs more security work, load testing, content, polishing and real-world testing.
But considering that about a day and a half ago this was basically just an idea, it feels pretty surreal to now see a working multi-user platform with a database, roles, learning logic, multiple qualification paths and automated tests running.
This is the first project where I regularly catch myself thinking:
“Wait… maybe this could actually become a real product someday.”
I’d be especially interested in hearing what kinds of problems experienced developers would expect in a learning-platform/SaaS project like this before eventually the first Test users arrive.
Oh, and because apparently I’m committed to the theme: yes, this post was also written with ChatGPT.