Schedule of universities on the phones: how we spent the summer - in search of freelancers

Summer is a damned time for freelancing. But not from the freelancer, but from the customer.

April 3, 2013 we started in 5 universities. They started, not everyone completed what they wanted, but it was already April. Behind him, I remind you, May, half of which is holidays, and the second half is a test week. Therefore, April is all we had to do to check whether our project will go down at all or not.
')
In April we published a post on Habré about our project. This post gave us more than any other publication: the most installations, the most calls from universities, the most offers to help with the project, and we are eternally grateful to Habr and you, because you are Habr. This post is our report on what we have done over the summer, but still it is worth recalling that we have a project.

Timetable for universities on mobile phones. In principle, this is already enough to understand the main point. We released applications on Android and iOS, developed the server part in PHP (and now rewrote in Java, here we are “forward-thinking” guys). In our mobile applications, students and teachers can watch their schedule and set tasks for classes. All applications are free.

To get the schedule of the university to us in the database, sometimes it was necessary to show wonders of wit / hard work / diplomacy. It is important to understand that we are doing as if the aggregator of schedules, i.e. The student chooses the university, faculty, group and gets his schedule. He does not need to fill in anything himself. But in order to do so, we must first get this schedule.

We do not have a single database of these schedules in our country. Moreover, not every higher education institution has a schedule on the site, and even if there is, then this is a cutting from a piece of paper into a Word, which also does not suit us - we would be unloaded from the database :) And here are universities that have a full electronic schedule on Our statistics is 4-5%. This means that the schedule from these universities can be parsed. Or, if you're lucky, and there will be a good admin with whom you can quickly get in touch - to do the integration through the API.

As a result, good admins have so far turned out to be only in TPU, TUSUR, ITMO, GUAP, CHI BSUEP and Ekonomfake MSU.

The others with the electronic timetable are already just stupidly parsim, although they would prefer it more civilized.

For those who have nothing, we provide an excel file with macros (and instructions for it), where you need to interrupt your schedule. Here there are different people. Either those who say “Of course, I will help for my university, interrupt the whole schedule,” or “will you pay me money?”, But the most popular answer is: “I have no time.” In some cases, we interrupt ourselves. For example, I came to Seliger to make a schedule for them there in our application. I had to agree with them for quite some time that I would interrupt their schedule every day for free, and they would recommend my application for the Seliger schedule for that. In general, everything turned out well, we were robust, we interrupted every day for 3 weeks, our application was installed there 3000 times. Whether it was necessary or not is unclear.

It’s good, when people meet who want to see the schedule of their high school in a mobile application, we try to work with such people. In order to somehow thank such people, we made a section on the site “Who helped us” (at the bottom of the page).

However, freelancers

However, I would like to return to some technical aspects. We were released with the support of a periodic schedule (i.e. there are 2 weeks: even / odd and 7 days a week), then it turned out that in our country the calendar schedule is quite popular (i.e., there are often couples only on specific dates) and the modular schedule (disciplines go periodically, but from such and such date to such and such). Then they remembered that there is a session: exams and tests are the schedule. In general, it is necessary to rewrite the structure. We had no regular PHP developers, and a long story began with freelancers, which ended in early August ... nothing. As a result, we did not get the result. Since May and all summer, our brother-freelancer loves to disappear, or, say, to fall ill, before finishing to the end, which is already there. And even nobody needs money, yet our people do not work for money. It ended with our investor giving out his developers to rewrite the entire structure. And we finally got some kind of team.

From the first post on Habré, people started to make a version under Windows Phone. Specifically, Anton Sizikov (there was a second guy, but he disappeared after a while), who has the main work and who has been sifting for WinPhone for the sake of interest for 3-4 months. Anton, thank you. We are under WinPhone trying to make at least some version to be. Money for serious and fast development under WinPhone is not allowed, you have to somehow get out of the situation.

What is going on now?

On September 1, we launched a new version of the application for Android, and all the first week we fixed bugs on the server side and in the application. On iOS, we got into a situation similar to the server part, but we finished it somehow (many thanks to dair ) and published it. Those. It was not possible to launch a brilliant start at the beginning of the school year, investors are full of eyes, and we are nervously trying to do it. TO JUST ALL WORK WELL. Although we have already conceived how to make self-regulation of changes in the schedule through the students themselves, but so far we are finally recovering.

Thus, we have schedules of the following universities / faculties right now:

Moscow
- MSU (EconomFak, FGP, MehMat, Faculties of Soil Science, Sciences and Materials, Geology, Fundamental Physico-Chemical Engineering, Political Science, Bioengineering and Bioinformatics, BioFac, Fundamental Medicine, VMC)
- MIPT (Faculties of Innovation and High Technologies, Nano-, Bio-, Information and Cognitive Technologies, General and Applied Physics, Radio Engineering and Cybernetics, Management and Applied Mathematics, Physical and Quantum Electronics)
- HSE (Faculty of State and Municipal Administration)
- RSUH
- MGMU them. THEM. Sechenov (Faculty of Dentistry)
- EAOI
- University "Synergy"

St. Petersburg
- ITMO
- BSTU "VOENMEH"
- SUAI
- SPSU (faculties of Oriental Studies, African Studies, Philology, Arts, MedFak, MatFur, Philosophy, EconomicsFac)

Tomsk
- TUSUR
- TPU

Novosibirsk city
- NSU
- NGPU IMPiSR

Chita
- CHI BSUEP

Krasnodar city
- KubGTU

Orenburg
- OGU

Barnaul
- AltGU

Stavropol
- SSAU

But a number of schedules accumulated in the import queue.

If we reach you to the heart, we will be happy if:
- Help with familiar admins from universities (what if you yourself are admin)
- Help with familiar active students who could interrupt the schedule for their university (or you are such a student)
- Introduce adequate people from higher educational institutions to whom progress is not alien (we understand that it is unlikely that you are one of them)
- Share the post about us on Vkontakte , Facebook with your comment.