Sniper watches courses at Rutgers, and notifies you when they open up. When courses at Rutgers fill up, you often spend a lot of time checking the registration system to see if a course of your choice is open. Sniper is a web service that runs a cronjob in the backend to check the registration system for you. Sniper was inspired by Abe Stanway’s Course Sniper that went stale after he graduated from the university. Sniper watches courses for over 5,000 people each semester. Check out the live version if you’re looking to snipe a course.
This project is, by far, the project I’m most proud of working on. Rutgers has a system in place called Nextbus which allows us to get live bus times online from GPSes that are installed on campus buses. I implemented a simple text message interface into the Nextbus API inspired by Shuttleboy. I used Textmarks to call my web service on receipt of a text message. At the peak of its use (a couple of years ago, before smartphones really took off), RUBUS received around ~10,000 requests every week. The service has been running on its own for two years, and I’ve enjoyed listening to feedback and acting on it.