The schedule of universities on the phone: we spent the summer — in search of freelancers
Summer is cursed for freelancing time. But not on the part of the freelancer and the customer.
3 APR 2013 we have started in 5 universities. Started, not accomplished all that I wanted, but it was already April. For him, I remind you, may, half of which are holidays, and the second half — scoring week. So April is all we have left to check, go do our project at all, or not.
In April we published a post on habré about our project. This post gave us more than any other publication: most plants, most complaints from universities, most of the suggestions to help with the project, and we are eternally grateful for it Habru you, because you are the Habr. This post is our report on what we did over the summer, but still it is worth Recalling that we have for the project.
The schedule of universities on mobile phones. In principle, this is enough to understand the gist. We released the app on Android and on iOS, developed backend in PHP (and now rewrote in Java, here we are "visionary" guys). In our mobile apps students and teachers can view their schedule and set tasks for classes. All apps are free.
To get the schedule of the University to our database, sometimes we had to show the wonders of ingenuity/hard work/diplomacy. It is important to understand that we do like the aggregator schedules, i.e. a student chooses the University, faculty, group, and your schedule gets. He has nothing to fill himself. But to do so, it is necessary to schedule us first to obtain.
In our country there is no common base of these schedules. Moreover, not every University has a schedule on the website, and even if there is, it's the cutaways from the paper in the ward, what we do, we would unload from the database :) And universities that have a comprehensive electronic schedule according to our statistics 4-5%. This means that the schedule of these universities sparsit. Or, if you're lucky, and there will be a good admin, with which you will be able to quickly get in touch, to do integration via API.
In the end, good admins while in the TPU, TUSUR, ITMO, SUAE, CHI bsuel and MSU.
The rest of the electronic timetables are just stupid parsim, although would prefer more civilized.
For those who have nothing, we provide excel file with macros (and manual to it) where you want to interrupt your schedule. There are different people. Or those who say "of Course I will help for your University, will kill you all" schedule, or "and you tell me money will pay?", but the most popular answer: "I don't have time". In some cases, we interrupt ourselves. For example, I went to Seliger, there to do for them the schedule in our app. I had a long time to reconcile them, that I'll away for free to kill their schedule each day so they will recommend my app for a schedule of lake Seliger. Overall, everything turned out, we've a bit of experience, every day for 3 weeks was interrupted, our app installed there 3000 times. Need it or not — is unclear.
Well, when still there are people who want to see the schedule of their University mobile app, we are trying to work with. To somehow thank those people, we have done on your site "Who helped us" (bottom of page).
However, freelancers
However, I would like to return to some technical issues. We satelitales supports periodic schedule (i.e. 2 weeks: odd/even, 7 days a week), then it turned out that we quite popular in the country calendar schedule (i.e. often there are couples only in a specific date) and the unit schedule (discipline go periodically, but with such a date at such-and-such). Then I remembered that there is a session: exams and tests this is the calendar schedule. In General, it is necessary to rewrite the structure. Regular developers in PHP have not been, and began a long history with freelancers, which ended in early August... nothing. In the end, we never got the result. May and all summer our brother-freelancer likes to disappear, or, say, get sick, not finish to the end, which is already there. And even the money is useless, after all our people not for the money working. The upshot was that our investor has given its developers to rewrite the whole structure. And we have finally some semblance of a team.
With the first post on habré caught up people doing a version for Windows Phone. Specifically Anton Sizikov (there was also a second guy, but he disappeared for some time) that has a main job and which is for the interest nags under WinPhone slowly for 3-4 months. Anton, thank you. We are under WinPhone trying to do at least some version to was. Money on a serious and fast developing for WinPhone is not given, you have to get out of the situation.
What's going on now?
1 September we launched a new version of the app for Android and the first week fixing bugs on the server side and in application. On iOS, we are in a situation similar to the server part, but I somehow finished (thanks to dair) and published. Ie brilliant to start at the beginning of the school year failed, investors poured eyes, and we are nervously trying to get EVERYTHING JUST WORKED fine. Although already plotting how to make self-regulation changes in the schedule via the students themselves, but until finally come to life.
Thus we now have schedules for the following schools/faculties:
Moscow
— Moscow state University (Economics, FGP, MSU, faculty of Soil science, Science and materials, Geology, the Fundamental physical-chemical engineering, Science, Bioingeneria and bioinformatics, Biology Department, Fundamental medicine, VMK)
— MIPT (Department of innovations and high technologies, nano-, bio-, informational and cognitive technologies of General and applied physics, radio engineering and Cybernetics, control and applied mathematics, physical and quantum electronics)
Higher school of Economics (Faculty of state and municipal management)
— Russian state humanitarian University
— MSMU n. a. I. M. Sechenov (Faculty of Dentistry)
— EOI
University "synergy"
St. Petersburg
— ITMO
— BSTU "VOENMECH"
— SUAI
— St. Petersburg state University (faculties of Asian and African Studies, Philology, Arts, medical school, Alexey, Philosophy, Economics)
Tomsk
— TUSUR
— TPU
Novosibirsk
NGU
— NSPU Impisr
Chita
CHI bsuel
Krasnodar
— The Kuban state University
Orenburg
— OGU
Barnaul
— ASU
Stavropol
— SSAU
But in the queue for import has accumulated a number of schedules.
If we reach out to you to heart, you will be happy if:
— Will help with familiar staff from universities (suddenly you're the admin)
— Will help with the familiar active students who were able to their University to interrupt your schedule (or do you own a student)
— Introduce the appropriate people from the universities, which is not alien to progress (understand that is unlikely, and suddenly you're one of them)
— Share the post about us in Vkontakte, Facebook with your comment.
