Our story
Hi — I’m the developer behind My NFC Attendance. This app didn’t start as a business idea. It started with my wife, a lecture hall in Romania, and a problem I couldn’t just watch her deal with anymore.
No standard system in place
My wife is a senior lecturer at a university in Romania, and like every teacher there, she keeps attendance sheets — students who miss too many classes aren’t allowed to sit their exams. There just never was a standard way to do it. Every teacher found their own method, usually paper or a spreadsheet, and none of it was backed up anywhere. Sheets went missing, entries got mixed up, and students sometimes disputed whether they’d shown up at all. I watched her lose evenings to it — double-checking names, going back and forth over email — over something that should normally have taken five minutes.
A first attempt, in late 2019
I’m a software engineer, and watching someone I care about deal with a problem I could actually fix isn’t something I’m good at ignoring. So in late 2019 I started building her a digital attendance system: a PHP backend paired with a native Android app for marking students present in class.
Covid-19 put it on hold
Before I could finish it, Covid-19 arrived and universities moved everything online overnight. Attendance for a physical classroom stopped being the problem — the app I’d been building nights and weekends suddenly had nothing left to solve, so I put it away, half-finished.
Back to normal, and back to the drawing board
Once lockdowns ended and classes went back to being in person, the same old problem came right back with them — and so did my wife’s stack of attendance sheets. This time I wanted to do it properly: a native app that runs on both iOS and Android instead of Android only, with the backend rebuilt on Node.js instead of PHP. Same problem I’d watched her struggle with, built with everything I’d learned in the meantime.
My NFC Attendance today
That rebuild became My NFC Attendance: a tap of an NFC card or a QR scan, synced securely to the cloud, with no more lost sheets or arguments over who was in class. It started as something I built for one person I care about — it’s now used by teachers, schools, and training providers who had the exact same problem she did.
Built from a real problem, not a feature list
That’s still how I decide what’s worth adding to the app: would this have actually helped my wife back when she was buried in attendance sheets? If yes, it’s worth building. If it’s just a feature that looks good on a list, it can wait.
See how it works