Add course search & deadlines pages, Vercel deploy workflow, and repo docs/ignores

[DearMrFree]

Motivation

• Provide a searchable, filterable Course Catalog and a single-source deadlines page for the 2026–27 catalog cycle to make course discovery and milestone tracking easier.
• Enable automated Preview and Production deployments to Vercel from GitHub to streamline CI/CD.
• Improve repository hygiene and onboarding by adding Python ignores and a repository map / deployment notes in README.md.

Description

• Add a GitHub Actions workflow at .github/workflows/vercel-deploy.yml that creates Vercel Preview deployments for PRs and Production deployments on pushes to main, and expects VERCEL_TOKEN, VERCEL_ORG_ID, and VERCEL_PROJECT_ID secrets.
• Implement a new deadlines calendar module lib/course-deadlines.ts exporting MIT_COURSEWARE_DEADLINES and sortDeadlinesByDate.
• Add a deadlines page at app/courses/deadlines/page.tsx that renders the central deadline table and uses sortDeadlinesByDate.
• Enhance the course catalog in app/courses/page.tsx to support server-side searchParams (page now async) with a text search and honors checkbox filter, hide empty sections, and show a link to the new deadlines page.
• Update .gitignore to include Python caches, virtualenv and test caches.
• Expand README.md with a repository map, suggested next work items, and Vercel deployment instructions/secrets.

Testing

• No automated tests were executed as part of this change.

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Codex Task

[vercel]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
sofai	Ready	Preview, Comment	May 20, 2026 4:49am

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Normalize q before calling .trim()

searchParams values can be either string or string[] in App Router pages, but this code assumes q is always a string. If the URL contains repeated query params (for example /courses?q=math&q=cs), params.q becomes an array and (params.q ?? "").trim() throws a runtime TypeError, causing the page to fail. Please coerce q to a single string (e.g., first element) before trimming.

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