Cholo

The idea

Dhaka commutes are long and expensive, and thousands of BRAC University students travel similar routes every day. Cholo ("let's go" in Bangla) is a ride-sharing management system that lets students create shared vehicle trips, join others' trips, and split the cost, scoped to the university community so riders know who they are traveling with.

Trust through verification and ratings

Two mechanisms make community ride-sharing viable. First, registration is gated by BRACU G-Suite verification, so every account maps to a real student. Second, a rating and comment system after each trip builds a reputation layer: riders and trip creators review each other, which keeps behavior accountable over time.

Database-first design

Built for the CSE370 Database Systems course, the system's core is a normalized MySQL schema: students (with support for multiple phone numbers per student, a deliberately modeled one-to-many), trips with date, time, fare, and meetup location, recurring trip schedules, private-vehicle details, ratings, and an admin role for system maintenance. The PHP layer handles authentication, trip creation and joining, and the rating flow on top.

Working within course constraints (no framework, plain PHP and SQL) forced clarity about the data model itself, the part of a system that outlives any particular framework choice. I handled the database design and backend, with teammates on the front end.