Intro
Before I get started, it’s best I introduce myself. My name is Ivan Kuria and I’m a Computer Science Student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I interned at IBM this summer as a Software Engineer but the real story I want to share with you why I built a chrome extension that’s now used by 340+ students at my University.
Inspiration
This summer I was thinking about some cool side projects I can work on while preparing myself for the upcoming and dreadful recruitment cycle(don’t even get me started on leetcode prep). Anyways, in the past, I built projects like ecommerce sites or Twitter (now X) clones which were great practice, but they didn’t really solve problems for real people. I honestly wanted something different.
So I asked myself: what’s a problem I face every quarter as a college student?
The answer was obvious: course enrollment at UCSC.
Every time I enrolled, I had to open 10+ RateMyProfessors tabs to figure out which professors or sections to avoid. And if I lost track of a tab? Back to opening more. What should’ve taken 10 minutes often stretched into more than 30 minutes.
At first, I thought of potentially making some sort of full stack project, but it seemed overkill for what I was trying to achieve so I reduced the scope. I think that oftentimes when coding for fun, we tend to forget about other forms of software that exist and stick to what we know. This led me to the amazing and peculiar world of Chrome extensions. A tool we often take for granted can be used to do some awesome things(RIP adblock 🙁). After following a couple tutorials, I decided to give it a shot.
I took what I already knew, Javascript, HTML, CSS and using restful APIs,with what I had to learn: Chrome extension best practices. This involved teaching myself a whole new area of creating software but it was a really fun journey. If you’d like a more detailed guide on how I made it I’ll probably post a more detailed version.
Simply:
- It pulls professor info directly from the RateMyProfessors GraphQL endpoint.(thank you RMP🙂)
- It renders that data right inside UCSC’s enrollment page.
Before
After
Today over 340 students use it and counting! The biggest lesson I learned is that Impactful software doesn’t have to be complex. Sometimes the best projects aren’t the ones with the fanciest tech stacks(yes I see you NEXTjs users), but the ones that fix a single frustrating problem in your daily life. Also if you found anything I wrote about mildly interesting, follow me here or:
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