4 ms·

Usually it's not a lack of will but just institutional entrenchment. Students may volunteer but there's no path that would allow them to fix things.

kkylin 1y ago
I was around when MIT had its first online catalog. Reportedly hacked together by a grad student over a summer (probably not a whole summer). Anyway I think for the catalog there are no serious privacy issues, and there wouldn't be a problem having students work on it. Databases with student information (and that includes registering for classes) are a different story.
godelski 1y ago
I can confirm this. I recently graduated (PhD) and was constantly submitting fixes for my department's servers. I'm not even a networking person or anything... I do ML. And by fixes, I mean supplying the code and everything. One example is that the listing of classes generated a link as long as there was a folder on the server. Which the folders are automatically generated via the course offering of that term. This led to lots of links to nowhere when students were trying to see the course material and syllabus from previous offerings (so it was something people did quite a bit. Click, 404, back, click next, 404, repeat...). So the for my submit I found the file providing all the links, and the few lines around there. Provided a few alternatives such as "don't provide link unless there's an index.html inside" or "don't provide link if folder is empty". I even generated the one line `find` command that could go through and purge all empty directories that were older than 6mo (or any desired time). (That would clean up for anyone looking via the cli, which was more common than you'd expect) All the work was done, just someone with permissions needed to run. There were tons of small fixes (as well as some much bigger ones...) like this that I and others submitted. Very few ever were done. Maybe the IT guy's hands were tied but every time I walked past his office he was sitting on his couch watching Netflix on his iPad[0]. I saw 3 different IT employees in my time and none of them took action on any of those types of issues. I think the small things just get brushed off. Thinking "oh, well it's frustrating, but only happens a few times a year and doesn't cause much harm." Which, is true. But also, isn't the beauty of scaling in CS that even though 15 minutes of my work only saves a person 5 minutes (3 times a year, every year) that I'm saving that 5 minutes for hundreds or thousands of people? Saving 30 seconds doesn't sound like a lot but saving saving 100 people 30 seconds is saving an hour. If they have to do that once a day then you're saving a full work day every week. That's only 100 people too... But I learned an important lesson: the little things matter. [0] Not to bash him too much. When shit went down he usually responded pretty quickly. And grad students work some weird hours...

kkylin 1y ago

I was around when MIT had its first online catalog. Reportedly hacked together by a grad student over a summer (probably not a whole summer). Anyway I think for the catalog there are no serious privacy issues, and there wouldn't be a problem having students work on it. Databases with student information (and that includes registering for classes) are a different story.

godelski 1y ago

I can confirm this. I recently graduated (PhD) and was constantly submitting fixes for my department's servers. I'm not even a networking person or anything... I do ML. And by fixes, I mean supplying the code and everything. One example is that the listing of classes generated a link as long as there was a folder on the server. Which the folders are automatically generated via the course offering of that term. This led to lots of links to nowhere when students were trying to see the course material and syllabus from previous offerings (so it was something people did quite a bit. Click, 404, back, click next, 404, repeat...). So the for my submit I found the file providing all the links, and the few lines around there. Provided a few alternatives such as "don't provide link unless there's an index.html inside" or "don't provide link if folder is empty". I even generated the one line `find` command that could go through and purge all empty directories that were older than 6mo (or any desired time). (That would clean up for anyone looking via the cli, which was more common than you'd expect) All the work was done, just someone with permissions needed to run. There were tons of small fixes (as well as some much bigger ones...) like this that I and others submitted. Very few ever were done. Maybe the IT guy's hands were tied but every time I walked past his office he was sitting on his couch watching Netflix on his iPad[0]. I saw 3 different IT employees in my time and none of them took action on any of those types of issues. I think the small things just get brushed off. Thinking "oh, well it's frustrating, but only happens a few times a year and doesn't cause much harm." Which, is true. But also, isn't the beauty of scaling in CS that even though 15 minutes of my work only saves a person 5 minutes (3 times a year, every year) that I'm saving that 5 minutes for hundreds or thousands of people? Saving 30 seconds doesn't sound like a lot but saving saving 100 people 30 seconds is saving an hour. If they have to do that once a day then you're saving a full work day every week. That's only 100 people too... But I learned an important lesson: the little things matter. [0] Not to bash him too much. When shit went down he usually responded pretty quickly. And grad students work some weird hours...