Welp, looks I might be getting expelled from the University of Washington.
As many of you know, last quarter I built an initial version of HuskySwap for a class project. It was a simple app designed to help students find partners to trade spots in critical classes after they filled up. I’m sure other people have pursued this kind of thing before, but there’s no go-to solution at UW and I wanted to contribute something cool for everyone.
At first it was a fun project to catch up to the latest versions of .NET and Angular with some practice implementing features around database abstraction, real-time chat, and the full stack challenges associated with things like role-based permissions. I was probably going to build it anyway, so it was great that I could actually get course credit for CSE 403.
I was really proud of the MVP and excited that the people I demoed it for actually wanted to use it. So I set aside some time in my winter quarter schedule to start hardening it so I could launch ahead of spring quarter registration.
Then I came across the swagger docs for integrating with the registration system. The site says:
“The Student Web Service gives your application access to information in the Student database such as course data, registration data, section data, person data, and term data (general academic data).”
I got excited because it sounded like they were supportive of scenarios like mine. After all, UW aspires to be top ranked in both CS and business. Of course they would F/foster 😛 an entrepreneurial spirit!
I reached out to request an access token. I wasn’t too ambitious up front; all I wanted was read-only access to automate the course catalog import instead of having to manually enter every class. But if things went well it would be awesome to automate the process further or even find other gaps I could fill to improve the community experience.
Several hours later I received an unambiguous response: a “Notice of Violation of Registration Tampering Abuse Policy”. I was instructed to take down my demo site (and its handful of fake demo classes) or else they would begin the process that would culminate with my expulsion. I had originally reached out hoping to make the school experience better for everyone and they immediately went nuclear.
I’m not too worried about the threat since taking down the demo site is no big deal. But I’m a little heartbroken to see how the school views me. I thought they’d be excited about what I was pursuing—or at least that I was pursuing anything—but instead they’d rather have me simply leave.
I’m scheduled to graduate in a few months and am eager to move on to projects that don’t need to be cleared with the UW Registrar. If you know of anyone looking for a full-time software engineer with a knack for getting the attention of senior leadership, please send them my way! I can start full-time in June.
Link to repo: https://lnkd.in/gXKEBtQi
