Veil Lingo is a live one-on-one English speaking education platform targeting Chinese learners, connecting them with professional teachers from English-speaking countries. The platform name draws from John Rawls’ philosophical concept of the “veil of ignorance” — the idea being to create a fair, transparent teaching marketplace where the quality of instruction itself becomes the core basis for pricing. The project is deployed and live at talk-lingo.com.
↑ Live site preview above (or visit talk-lingo.com directly)
The project covers three user-facing portals: a student portal (browse teachers, book lessons, credit wallet, review system), a teacher portal (personal profile, calendar scheduling, earnings dashboard, rating feedback), and an admin backend (data dashboard, teacher approval, review moderation, violation management, system parameter configuration) — totaling 28+ pages and 34+ components.
Key technical highlights:
- Dynamic Pricing and Salary Algorithm: The platform’s core differentiating design. Lesson prices float dynamically based on a teacher’s booking rate — high-demand teachers see prices automatically rise, while prices pull back when demand is low, creating a positive incentive loop. Teacher salaries are similarly auto-adjusted based on demand and ratings, ensuring top teachers earn higher returns. All parameters are configurable in the admin backend, so strategy adjustments require no code changes.
- Pairwise Comparison Review System: Students can evaluate two teachers they’ve taken lessons with in a head-to-head comparison. This produces more reliable quality signals than traditional independent scoring, helping the platform more accurately identify differences in teaching ability.
- Multi-Dimensional Radar Chart Scoring: Teacher evaluations span multiple teaching dimensions, visualized as radar charts. This gives students an intuitive view of a teacher’s style and strengths, and provides teachers with clear direction for improvement.
- Mainland China Network Optimization: Geo-aware routing via Cloudflare Workers automatically selects the optimal access path for mainland users, reducing latency and improving availability.
- Full Internationalization Support: Complete bilingual coverage in Chinese and English, with 874 translation keys managing all user-facing copy through a translation system.
On the tech stack side, the frontend uses Next.js (App Router + Server Components) + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS + shadcn/ui. The backend runs on Supabase (PostgreSQL + Auth + Storage + Realtime), with Row-Level Security enforcing data access control. The app is deployed on Vercel, with Cloudflare handling CDN and DNS. The entire project was built from scratch to production launch, covering full-stack development end to end: database design (21 tables + 26 migration scripts), authentication and authorization, payment wallet, scheduled jobs, SEO optimization, and more.