This past semester, students had to create and plan out their spring semester schedules without the help of the widely popular site no8am. In 2014, engineering student Nadeem Nasimi ’17 created the website no8am to help students more efficiently build their course schedules. The site allowed for a clear and organized visualization of a student’s potential schedule, letting them move around different classes to find the best schedule for them. After Nasimi graduated from the University, the domain was not renewed and no8am was no longer in existence. However, Jimmy Wei ’21, a computer science & engineering major, recently recreated the popular site so that it will once again be available for student use.

“I had a difficult time working out which classes to take this semester without no8am’s visual aid. I have been using that site since freshman year and without it, life was sad,” Wei said. “I decided to recreate no8am since the old site was down due to changes in the University’s system. Originally I wanted to pick up where Nadeem left off, but it turns out it was just easier to recreate the whole thing from scratch.”

University students had started using Coursicle, a site that works with several universities across the country to help students plan their classes. With no8am being programmed for the University, Wei believes that students will feel more comfortable using no8am for all of their course schedule planning.

“There’s no major differences between my site and Nadeem’s site except a few aesthetic details; in fact, I tried to copy his design closely because I felt people who already used to the old site would find the switch easier,” Wei said.

Recreating the popular website proved to be a difficult task for Wei. He hopes to coordinate with the University staff, as Nasimi had in the past, to continue to build and improve upon the website.

“The main challenge I ran in was that Bucknell’s course schedule system blocks requests from outside Bucknell’s domain. This meant that I couldn’t run the code that would download the course info from my server and instead I had to manually run it from my own computer, which was quite tedious. This, in turn, caused other problems down the road, when the files I manually downloaded turned out to be too big for my free-tier server to handle. It took me a long time to figure out ways to compress the files so that my server doesn’t crash. Looking forward, it’d be great if I could get some funding from the University to upgrade my free-tier server, which probably wouldn’t work very well when course registration comes around,” Wei said. 

The site is complete and functional at the moment, though Wei is still hoping to make improvements. Students can visit and use the site at http://no8am.life.