I have to say that https://student.mit.edu/catalog/index.cgi looks like a great site! It is all public, and when you open a category (a static site), all the information appears all at once and you can Ctrl-F for keywords. It might not solve that "unknown unknown" problem that the author mentions, but it is certainly much preferable to the solution that our university used (https://www.his.de/hisinone; one example: all courses are displayed in a tree and if you click to unfold a node, the server generates verbose HTML and sends it to the client. This takes at least 10 seconds on good days).
ndriscoll · 13m ago
Yeah literally the only thing they need to do to fix it is get rid of the no-cache and Connection: close headers. Maybe make an "All" page for better CTRL-F? Surely their catalog doesn't change more than once per minute and could have some level of caching (at least with revalidation)? Keep-alive would cut out ~150 ms of page load time and letting at least something like nginx cache it seems like it would cut out another ~150 ms.
ncr100 · 2h ago
Advice: capitalize the S in Courseek, to emphasize the misspelling as intentional.
And, AWESOME WORK. This is truly "making things better", which is my favorite What Does An Engineer Do saying.
plasticchris · 25m ago
Unless the meaning was CourseEEK
mmmlinux · 1h ago
My understanding is you're allowed to automate the discovery of classes as much as you want. but as soon as you try to automate signing up for them you're gonna get in trouble.
r3a1d33p · 2h ago
Lots of school infrastructure is decades old. I bet lots of students can better manage the IT than the IT department. The only issue is security and privacy. Not sure if there is a balanced solution for self-governance.
conception · 1h ago
You probably were speaking in hyperbole, but there’s not a lot of school equipment out there still running windows XP and older. There’s some certainly but “lots”? Probably not except in the poorest of school systems.
buckle8017 · 1h ago
Windows XP? no
perl scripts written in the 90s controlling grades and course registration? Absolutely
wpm · 20m ago
I started at a university full-time in 2014 in the IT department. Same year a project to decommission an aging IBM mainframe that sat as a lynchpin in nearly every important operation on campus; course registration and thus billing and grades, transcripts, as well as a home-grown SSO from the early 2000s no one understood any more. The consulting costs were insane, as were the support costs, so that poor thing had to go (second prettiest rig in the datacenter after my Xserves).
When I left that job in 2022, I believe most of it had been offloadded, but I can't say for sure if they had actually shut the fucker down yet.
Usually it's not a lack of will but just institutional entrenchment.
Students may volunteer but there's no path that would allow them to fix things.
kkylin · 53m ago
I was around when MIT had its first online catalog. Reportedly hacked together by a grad student over a summer (probably not a whole summer).
Anyway I think for the catalog there are no serious privacy issues, and there wouldn't be a problem having students work on it. Databases with student information (and that includes registering for classes) are a different story.
daedrdev · 2h ago
I've heard of people making reminder bots for schools that give you a short time slot to accept getting off a waitlist before it moves to the next person
And, AWESOME WORK. This is truly "making things better", which is my favorite What Does An Engineer Do saying.
perl scripts written in the 90s controlling grades and course registration? Absolutely
When I left that job in 2022, I believe most of it had been offloadded, but I can't say for sure if they had actually shut the fucker down yet.
Students may volunteer but there's no path that would allow them to fix things.
Anyway I think for the catalog there are no serious privacy issues, and there wouldn't be a problem having students work on it. Databases with student information (and that includes registering for classes) are a different story.
I also wrote a short piece reflecting on vibe coding this app and musing on the broader implication of building non-scalable software. https://stackdiver.com/posts/non-scalable-software/