Schedge: An Albert API

Show of hands here, who hates Albert? No, not your buddy Albert, who I’m sure is a great person. I’m talking about NYU’s Albert, the wonderful course registration site that totally doesn’t make you want to murder someone.

I, for one, detest it. I could go on and on about how much I hate every little detail, but let’s stay focused here. Fortunately, my friend, Albert Liu (yes yes, the irony is palpable) at BUGS, has built a solution in the form of Schedge.

What is Schedge? Schedge is a program that scrapes Albert, then provides a simple API for course data. You can query course data from different semesters with all the corresponding meeting times and recitations.

Of course with this data, we can easily build a better user interface for exploring courses. I’ve already written a quick proof of concept. It’s not much to look at, but it’s a start.

However that’s just the beginning. You see, Schedge is more than just a way to build course explorer: Schedge is whatever you want it to be. Want to build an app that visualizes course times? Go ahead! Want to see how course options have changed over the years? Why not? Want to make a random schedule generator? Do it!

I’m really curious to see how people use Schedge. Torch’s mission is to promote and incubate NYU’s CS community. Hopefully, by offering an API to a problem so near and dear to NYU students’ hearts, we can get people writing code to solve their everyday issues. If people can build projects with passion and dedication, then they’ll learn far more building than from any course or any lecture. And nothing inspires passion more then waiting for Albert to goddamn load.

Schedge is still very very new and therefore will go through some growing pains. We’re adding features as quickly as we can, but there’s only a few developers currently. Which is another place where you can help! We specifically chose a stack for Schedge that makes it easy for NYU students to contribute. Namely, we wrote Schedge in Java ¹ with a very simple framework called Javalin. If you’ve taken Intro to CS at NYU, you can contribute! If you haven’t, you can also contribute! We will happily teach you Java and everything else you need to know.

If you’re interested, reach out to either Albert Liu or me. Or just clone the repo and start playing around.

Schedge is currently up here. There’s a minor issue where http links aren’t redirected to https, so don’t go to http://schedge.torchnyu.com/ and come running to me that the API’s down. We use HTTPS for everything…whether we like it or not. We have basic API docs set up, but feel free to ping us if something doesn’t make sense.

Now go out there and build something with Schedge!