I’m studying physics, and I build things. The idea for caefisica.com didn’t come from wanting another project, it came from a recurring problem that I had and thought other students faced too.

The hardest part of a class often wasn’t the material itself. It was finding the right resources: class notes, past exams, or book recommendations that could make a difference. You could spend days studying with a book that covered your topic but went deep into irrelevant topics for your particular class ¹ , so you’d end up moving to the next book, and the next, and the next, wasting time you could have used productively.

You need to self-study effectively to succeed in this career. The faculty struggles with punctuality, motivation and engagement—partly due to age gaps, since few young professors teach here. Teaching quality varies widely. You only discover this only after enrolling in courses, so you must adapt by identifying the important topics and practicing problem-solving as soon as possible. Sometimes professors share their textbooks, but often you have to figure it out alone.

So… how do we solve this? The solution seemed simple: after finishing a course, why not have students who passed share their study materials? Their notes, helpful YouTube channels, books, and recommendations. They’ve already been through this process and know what works and what doesn’t.

At our school, the School of Physics, we have a knowledge fragmentation problem. Each graduating class, or base ² , has (sometimes) its own collection of resources. Professors share materials with their classes—solved problems, theory notes, formula sheets—but once the semester ends, that material usually just fades out of existence, forgotten by those who passed.

Students from one class rarely share notes or exams with newer students, which is understandable since it’s not their responsibility and they may not know people from other classes.

Sometimes a class creates its own repository, like a shared Google Drive folder. This happened to the class of 2019 but the material only spanned about 2 or 3 semesters and was very limited. The class of 2019 created one that spanned 2-3 semesters with limited material. The class of 2020 , initially led by Nelson Noa who was class delegate at the time, built a comprehensive repository covering all six semesters with materials from many courses. But this was a one-time effort that wasn’t maintained after graduation ³ . The class of 2021 didn’t manage to create anything similar.

We’ll know we’re successful when we’ve built a place where any student, from any year, can easily find what they need, even for advanced courses from areas A, B, or C. ⁴

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Our goal is straightforward: we want every physics student to have an equal shot at success. When we say “opportunities,” we mean that everyone should know about the same scholarships, have easy access to the same books, and hear the same recommendations. That’s it.

Our mission is to keep information flowing for all students’ benefit.

We’re tackling this in phases.

First, we built the basics. We set up social media channels and a public WhatsApp group to start sharing opportunities right away. Then we prototyped and launched the first version of caefisica.com , focused on the 2018 curriculum in less than a year.

The website is built with Hugo , a static site generator, which makes it incredibly fast. We paired it with Bootstrap for the design and a headless CMS to manage content. We even set up a GitHub Action that automatically checks for broken links, maintaining resource reliability. This whole process happened openly between early 2022 and 2023. You can view and build the entire project from Github at caefisica/web-main .

You can see this work at the caefisica/NotasTeX repository. We’re also building a scrapping tool to automatically share scholarships and events across all our WhatsApp groups and the website, eliminating manual posting. ⁵

Next, we want to expand. We’re also working on a news feed that automatically pulls physics-related articles. The repository is at caefisica/news-reader , with data scraping improvements at caefisica/news-scraper . We are also looking into ways to improve site search and automate social media posts.

Many ideas, one maintainer. But with more people involved, I think we can make this work.

Success for us isn’t about traffic numbers, since physics undergraduates is already a niche group, and 800 visits a month is already plenty.

We’ll succeed if:

• Students from different classes contribute new content
• More students apply for exchanges and graduate school using information we provide
• New student groups form around specific physics areas
• People actually give us feedback on the site and suggest new ideas

And we’ll fail if:

• Nobody uses our channels
• Exchange program participation remains unchanged
• The website becomes stale and outdated
• We end up building this in a bubble, without talking to other students

@caefisica attempts to build something useful for the community. I’ve learned from others’ videos and code and benefited from the tools they built, so I want to contribute back. If someone else can avoid the same obstacles I faced, that’s a win.