5C students love Hyperschedule, but few know who’s behind it. As course registration for the Spring 2025 semester approaches on Nov. 12, Hyperschedule — a student-run 5C course scheduling website — frequently pops up on students’ laptops.
The current maintainers, Next Ongarjvaja HM ’26, Edward Donson HM ’26 and Stephen Xu HM ’27, shared insights into what goes on behind the scenes of one of the 5Cs’ most beloved and widely used websites.
Radon Rosborough HM ’20 originally created Hyperschedule for the 2017 5C Hackathon as a user-friendly alternative to clunky student portals. Although some portal alternatives — such as HMC Scheduler — were available, none caught on quite like Hyperschedule.
Soon after its release, Kye Shi HM ’22 added some features to enhance the user experience.
“Some of [the features I suggested] were really silly like the colors [that display the classes], but people loved the colors,” Shi said. “We changed the colors once and all my friends said, ‘Bring back the old colors, these colors suck.’”
As Rosborough’s graduation approached and Hyperschedule became increasingly popular across the 5Cs, Shi stepped up as a maintainer.
Initially, Shi’s main focus was simply keeping the site alive, paying out-of-pocket to keep the site running through its host server. By 2020, according to the Hyperschedule GitHub page, monthly traffic during course registration exceeded 17,000 hits and was used by over 1,000 students across the 5Cs.
Mia Celeste HM ’24 later joined Shi as co-maintainer. Together, they revamped the code to make it more accessible for future developers.
With the code newly written and Celeste’s graduation fast approaching, Celeste sent an email seeking new students to join the team. By November 2023, Ongarjvaja, Donson and Xu were on board.
Ongarjvaja had some computer science experience in high school but started at Harvey Mudd College as a physics major. He later decided to double major in Computer Science. Ongarjvaja became particularly interested in the numerous subfields within computer science and website development.
“Website development is cool in the way you can build something that you can physically see, there’s some design part to it,” Orgarjvaja said. “Also, there’s some back end and structural parts that you have to learn.”
Donson, an intended Chemistry major, had a limited computing background. Prior to Hyperschedule, Donson worked on a project as a front-end developer — building the visible and interactive aspects of websites. Although he felt underqualified when applying to work for Hyperschedule, he hoped to develop his skills on the job.
“I didn’t really have any of the skills [Hyperschedule] was advertising, but I just put my name down,” Donson said. “I was like, ‘I’ll definitely learn something.’”
“There’s a bunch of people in one concentrated space that are very ambitious and it sort of motivates me to try harder.”
Xu, who is considering a major in Computer Science, has taken on many personal programming projects since his start in freshman year of high school, including a class project centered around the construction of an interactive 2D physics engine. Xu joined as a freshman after an email to Celeste which simply read, “I can code a little bit.”
“I feel like ‘I can code a little bit’ is a bit of an understatement,” Donson laughed.
From there Xu began attending meetings and quickly made his way in as a part of the new trio of maintainers.
Reflecting on the project’s benefits, Donson noted that the ambition of his peers — and classmates who were considering becoming maintainers — motivated him to learn more. He’s recently started working on creating servers and other personal projects that help him further develop his skills.
“There’s a bunch of people in one concentrated space that are very ambitious and it sort of motivates me to try harder,” Donson said.
Previously, Hyperschedule was funded by the Associated Students of Harvey Mudd College (ASHMC). ASHMC rescinded the funding after the Spring 2024 semester — they suggested that due to the website’s widespread use across the 5Cs, funding should come from a broader 5C source, according to Ongarjvaja.
Donson took on much of the work in securing funding for the group. Donson attended numerous meetings and sent countless emails to student governments and other groups across the 5Cs. Eventually, Hyperschedule secured funding from HMC administration.
“In that period, the day-to-day was pretty stressful because we didn’t know where money was coming from,” Donson said.
With funding secured, the trio has shifted their primary focus to fixing bugs — adding code to ensure dates export properly to external services like Google Calendar or fixing login issues after The Claremont College Services (TCCS) made changes that impacted some users’ access. The maintainers also validate and correct data about courses that often come in with errors on the site such as incorrect course times and dates.
The group plans to implement server backups so the site can continue to run if issues on one server arise.
“We’re just aiming for more and more reliability, error logging and a small bit of new features,” Xu said.
Users can report bugs they encounter on Hyperschedule’s GitHub page, a website platform that allows developers to store, share and collaborate on code. Beyond reporting issues, users can submit pull requests, allowing them to suggest and contribute code that maintainers can review and implement to fix bugs.
“We are looking for things we can improve on, so we do want people to make reports,” Xu said. “The people who do submit issues, we are grateful for.”
Facebook Comments