While working at 3Months as a developer, I am also completing a Bachelor of Business Information Systems at Victoria University. One of the things that rolls around twice a year and always causes students headaches is the signups system - it’s one of the bragging points of the School of Information Management at Victoria, as it was build as a project by a group of students there (Hence the name ‘S-Cubed = SSS = SIM Signups System). In itself, it’s a good application - it fulfills it’s brief of managing signups for tutorials and workshops, and lecturers and students alike seem to have no huge issues using is. The problem is though, is that its performance under load is crap - it simply was not build for the load that it receives when tutorial signups for 2 courses of 700 people each opens at 9am, and each of those 1400 people trying to get the exact tutorial they want are continually refereshing the page and so exacerbating the server load even more.

This server load doesn’t just extend to slow page load speed - since the site has not been build with scalability in mind, there have been ongoing issues with sessions expiring as people try and signup for a tutorial or workshop, people stuck halfway through a transaction, and the server even goes down every now and then. What I am proposing is an open framework that takes the best aspects of this type of system, and builds upon it techniques to optimize page load speed, and increase scalability. It seems to me that Universities in general are lacking a system that allows them to smoothly run signups (usually they are dependent on modified forum software, paper signups, emails or proprietary in-house systems), and so this is definitely something that is marketable around the world. As I see it, here are the base requirements for such a system: * LDAP and OAuth Authentication so that students do not need to ‘register’ to sign up for a tutorial * Accurate time-based releases of tutorials and workshops that do not require human intervention * Automatic server load monitoring with the ability to increase allocated resources if necessary (i.e. this application is an ideal candidate for Rackspace Cloud or Heroku) * Per-course and per-University analytics for better scheduling of tutorial and workshop release times and how students are accessing the system. * The ability for lecturers and course administrators to export and print class lists, tutorial lists, and workshops list with all student data or just a subset. This project is definitely going on the work pile for my personal projects

  • it’s got a couple of interesting aspects to it which I haven’t approached before (Such as LDAP from Rails), and generally seems to follow along with my ethos of community-oriented ‘responsible web applications’.