NUSMods

NUSMods, short for NUS Modifications, is a non-profit, open source application built by students for students. It provides students of the National University of Singapore (NUS) with an alternative way to plan their school timetables with a user-friendly timetable builder where students can plan their timetable via drag and drop.
In addition, NUSMods functions as a complete knowledge bank of NUS modules. It provides NUS students useful module-related information such as archived CORS bidding statistics, community-driven module reviews and discussions
NUSMods was founded in 2012 by Eu Beng Hee, who was then a student in NUS School of Computing. He realised that the timetable builder that NUS provided for students was not user friendly. When he graduated in 2014, Tay Yang Shun, who is also from NUS School of Computing, took over the responsibility of upgrading and maintaining the application. Before joining the NUSMods team, Tay, together with Toh Weiqing, founded Corspedia. The purpose of Corspedia was to publish past statistics regarding the bidding of modules in NUS in a way which is easily understood. These statistics were obtained from NUS’ website the bidding points for a single module could be compared across semesters. When Tay joined the NUSMods team, he immediately integrated Corspedia into NUSMods. Tay also contributed to NUSMods by revamping the user interface, designing a logo and making the NUSMods’ Facebook page in line with the website.
Developers
Core team members
*Tay Yang Shun, is currently working at GrabTaxi as a software engineer.
*Liu Xinan
*Xu Bili
*Ang Yen Ling - Marketer
Other developers who have contributed to NUSMods currently or previously
*Ashray Jain
*Hong Lu
*Zhu Chunqi
*Tan Guo Xiang
*Tan Wei Seng
*Jishnu Mohan
*Han Lin
*Franklin Gu
*Sam-Mauris Yong
*Chen Jingwen
Marketing
According to Tay Yang Shun, the developing team does not do a lot to spread NUSMods among students. Anyone who is interested in helping out can view the source code and fix issues.
**IVLE Cloud Sync simplifies workbin management by pushing new files to your Dropbox and giving you automatic updates as they happen
*Corspedia
**A search engine for NUS CORS Bidding Archives
Use of Application Programme Interface
NUSMods makes use of API, and it is still in its early stage of development.
NUSMods API consolidates and normalizes various bits of NUS module information from the following sources:
*CORS historical bidding statistics
*CORS module information listings
*IVLE API
*NUS Bulletin
*NUS Examination Time-Table
*NUS Living Lab API
Information about the various modules offered in NUS may change several times a day. Using JSON API, together with support from CORS and JSONP, the NUSMods API is generated using statistical methods so that the API can be as fast as possible and also browsable online at http://api.nusmods.com.
Web crawlers are broken down into modules, written separately as Grunt tasks using simple filesystem caching and HTTP if-modified-since headers so a specific subset of information can be easily retrieved. During the developing process, this helps to reduce waiting time.
Activities
Module review contest
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In December 2014, NUSMods organised a module review competition where the best reviews would win cash vouchers in order to encourage students to submit their reviews on taken modules. There were also prizes for several fun categories - Funniest, Most Creative and Most Rage. The review function uses Disqus plugin which embeds photograph and videos in the reviews. In less than a month, over 200 reviews were submitted.
Future developments
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In the a recent interview with Tay, 29 January 2015, he mentioned the next huge release would include a user login function which would allow students to store their generated timetables in the servers so as to access it via smartphones or other devices. As part of NUSMods' collaboration with other school wide services, NUSMods has also introduced NUSWhispers (a confession pages for NUS students), and Bare Nusessities (a Humans of New York for NUS) onto NUSMods Webpage.

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