From the lack of blog posts in the last 2 weeks and a load of obscure Twitter messages, you may have guessed that I was up to something. Well, your suspicions are very right!

I hereby present you with, Courselect, preview edition!

What is it you ask? Well, it is an attempt at unifying all information that you ever want to know about a course you are thinking about taking. It also helps you figure out what course you want to take. This is a preview release of the website so it doesn’t have all of the scary features yet.

The scary features takes a bit more time to polish up. They also require lots of data. Courselect currently indexes 2,637 courses, 9,222 classes, and 9,372 course instructors offered at University of Waterloo and its affiliated campuses.

All that. Crammed into about… 2 megabytes.

Courselect - Displaying a course

How is this better than the existing system? It doesn’t have that silly “hours of operation” to begin with. Although they do have a valid argument in that university students should all be in bed by midnight. Hah! As if! Have they not heard of the Operating Systems course?

You are also able to search across all of the courses for topics that you are interested in. For example, “MIMO control systems theory“, “Stochastic Calculus“, “Roman history“, or even “Game theory“! I’ll admit that the natural language search is still a big lame-O right now, but I just don’t have time to build up that dictionary right now.

There are known issues with the website already, and I’m working on getting them fixed up for the next release with the new features. If there’s something that doesn’t give you the “right vibes”, leave me a message. If there’s something really cool that you wish Quest did, leave me a message as well.

This was done with on average of 3-4 hours per day over the entire duration of roughly two weeks by myself. I sure could’ve used some help, but it’s been a good exercise in rehabilitating my coding and database skills. I learned a whole lot about optimizing systems like this during this time, and then some more about database cloud organization. Now I just need someone to hand me over a few server racks to start me up some experiments!

Alright, enough of that nonsense. In one of the future refreshes, I’m planning to complete one or more or none of these features…

• Search by instructor
• Course historical data display
• Schedule builder
• Academic profile tracker
• Course suggestion
• Course t***** we’ll keep this under the wraps for now

Let me know what you think!

Again, the URL is http://www.uwlive.ca/courselect/

Note: A lot of the features above would’ve been implemented for this release, but… I accidentally got hooked on this silly game. Look at those computer requirements… oh yea.