Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

feat: add itcr parser #968

Open
wants to merge 3 commits into
base: develop
Choose a base branch
from

Conversation

sGerli
Copy link

@sGerli sGerli commented Mar 5, 2023

Description

Hi, first of all I want to introduce myself. I'm Stefano Gerli, a former ITCR student. During my last years of school I created a fork of semesterly to help me create my schedule, at the end I published it and now its used by thousands of ITCR students before the enrollment period every semester. The only problem with that is that since the start it has been hosted in my own personal servers, which at the beginning wasn't that big of an issue because I was also using them for other projects that covered the costs, but now I just have them to keep the ITCR version of this project alive. So I don't want to keep eternally paying for them, but I also don't want to abandon the project. That's why I decided to create this updated version of the parser that's compatible with the current version of Semesterly (although has some usability issues on the UI side, but we'll get there later), and hopefully we can find a solution to the problem.

Usability Issues

  • ITCR has multiple campuses all around Costa Rica, and all of them offer their courses through multiple modalities (Virtual, Semivirtual, and In person), thats why for students it's really important to know where and what modality they want to add to their schedule. On my fork I had changed the lecture session cards to display the campus and modality.
    image
  • I don't have access to some of the data your using in the JHU version like size, enrollment, and waitlist. That ties back to the previous point and why I swapped the capacity of the lecture session for the campus and modality.
  • The calendar currently starts at 8 am, but in ITCR lecture sessions can start from 7:30 am all the way to probably about 10 pm. (Fixed with Timetable: Expand to 24 hours and make it auto-scroll to best view #971)
  • The JHU login doesn't really makes sense for the ITCR version
  • I see that in this new version you've added a date start and end to the sessions, thats data that I don't really have so I just populated it with the current date, and it doesn't seem to have any effect (at least right now).

Most of this issues aren't that complex to solve, I think that most of them can be solved through a config file like the one located in the parsers, just to hide or show data depending on the university.

Note

I didn't add ITCR to the active.py or to the parser scripts in this mr, so those changes might still be necessary for making it work.

Change Log

  • Added the ITCR parser
  • Added ITCR to the lists of universities

@JJamesWWang
Copy link
Member

Hi @sGerli, thank you for creating this pull request.

As the main issue appears to be the problem of server costs, do you think it would be possible to convince ITCR to fund or help manage your forked version of the project? That is currently how it works with JHU; we're backed by the IT department and they pay our server costs. I think this would be the best option because your school could benefit from having an existing student project, giving opportunity for CS students to work on a live project and make an impact at their school. Since you have many existing students using the site, I think you could make a good case.

If that's not possible, I think helping maintain Semester.ly on ITCR campuses could be done, and I'm not opposed to adding your school to our parser if maintaining it wouldn't be too large of a burden. However, since I'm graduating in 2 months, I would like to leave this decision to the next lead @JiaqiWang18, because he will likely be the one maintaining ITCR's site.

If he is up for it, my main concern is that we will probably need someone from ITCR to help us maintain it properly. We won't know when to add new semesters to the parser as I imagine your school's schedule is different from ours, and we won't know if we end up breaking things specific to ITCR because none of us will be using your version.

The usability issues you've mentioned don't seem to be too difficult to address, but it'll probably still take some time since right now it's not abstracted to the point of easily substituting in the changes you need.

@sGerli
Copy link
Author

sGerli commented Mar 5, 2023

@JJamesWWang thanks for your reply. Originally I had looked into that option, but it wasn't really possible, so if possible the second option would be great. For now I can continue to help your team maintain this version (schedules, breaking api changes if they ever occur, etc), but that's a great suggestion, I could ask among the CS students to see if someone is up for the task.

Yeah and as for the usability issues if we decide to go forward we could discuss, prioritise, and try to find the best solutions for them.

And congrats on your upcoming graduation!

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants