OK so if you've ever been a CUNY student you know the drill. You need a class to graduate. It's full. You sit there refreshing CUNYFirst like a maniac every 30 seconds hoping someone drops. It's the worst.
I got tired of doing this so I automated it!
I built a Python tool using Selenium WebDriver and Chromium that monitors course availability and enrolls you automatically the second a seat opens up. It picks up openings in under 5 seconds. For context, manually checking takes over a minute if CUNYFirst is being slow (which it always is).
Then I thought, why am I the only one using this? So I built a Discord bot on top of it. Students could just tell the bot which classes they wanted and it would handle everything. At one point I had over 60 people using it at the same time across a bunch of different Discord servers!
This project taught me more than most of my actual courses. Async programming, web scraping, browser automation, building APIs that people are depending on at 2 AM. Someone literally messaged me at like 2:30 in the morning going "IT WORKED, I GOT THE CLASS" and I was lying in bed grinning like an idiot.
It also got me some recognition in the QC CS community, which was new for me. People started knowing me as the guy who builds stuff that solves actual problems instead of just homework assignments. That felt good!