Side build · UOWD · 2021–23
Project Guild
Two tools that gave hundreds of students their time back. One still runs. One got killed by the university. Both were worth building.
01 · wam & gpa calculator
Imagine it's your final year. You need to check your WAM - your weighted average mark. The university's solution: manually enter every single course, its credit hours, and its grade, one by one. Thirty-plus subjects. Then if you want your GPA equivalent for a WES application, you're doing it all again on a different website.
I built a parser catered to UOW students. Go to SOLS, select your grade table, paste it. Done. No forms, no clicking, no repeat. WAM and GPA calculated instantly.
the problem
the fix
02 · timetable visualiser
Every trimester - three times a year - students had to plan their timetable from a dense, paginated HTML table. No filtering. No visual layout. Just an endless wall of rows: subject codes, professor names, timeslots, campuses. Cross-referencing it all took an average of six hours per student.
I built a visualiser. Filter by degree, by professor, by subject. See your week as a calendar. Spot conflicts automatically. The JSON was embedded in the page's HTML - I extracted it and turned a nightmare into something that felt like a product.
the problem
the fix
features
and then...
The university moved the timetable behind a login.
Two weeks after launch, complaints started rolling in - the data was stale. Turns out UOWD changed the timetable format without notice. I built a crawler that scraped the page three times a day. Then they changed the format again. I updated the parser. Then they changed it again. Then they hid the whole thing behind authentication. The site went dark.
But while it lived, it was the best thing I'd built. Hundreds of students used it every trimester. People I'd never met thanked me in the hallways.
Some things are worth building even if they don't last.