Next is writing code entirely. Whatever has the most robust documentation will be the next big thing, since AI agents will be writing the code for the programmers.
This is a great project at CMU. Worked on it from the beginning as an undergrad.
It’s a very unique project: students have the ability to be involved in almost all of the roles of the project - from mentoring high school teachers to writing new course content and working on backend systems. There are 2 professors who oversee the project, and a handful of awesome full time staff to guide and manage the CMU students.
The approach was fairly simple: access to the college board’s website was geo-IP restricted for about 5 days time. It would start with a small collection of states, and each day over the five days another group of states would get access to the site starting at ~8:00am EST. I would get a few AWS/GCP/DigitalOcean nodes in a DC that had an IP in a state releasing on the first day. Put a small JS script on the nodes that would use the username and password input from students to sign in to their Account and send back the scores. Basically just a proxy without the need for configuration.
Reminds me of a passion project I started in high school that went completely viral and took on a life of its own. Wrote a small script for my friends to check their AP scores a few days early. Required high schoolers giving clear text access to their entire CollegeBoard account so I could log on and scrape their scores. Somehow it got posted to Reddit and from that year on, grew wildly. Got to almost 2 million students checking their score in its peak year. It was immensely fun while it lasted (ran for about 7 years) and honestly I miss the thrill of it. CollegeBoard now releases all scores on the same day so the site is pretty much useless now. Definitely always looking to chase the thrill of that score release day again though.
Congrats on a successful end to a fun high school project! Stories like this are always fun to read.
That’s not exactly true - as an Amazon affiliate you do see the exact items purchased under each of your specific tracking IDs, as well as the price it was purchased for, category and device group it was purchased using (desktop, tablet, mobile). This also includes any purchases the user makes in a 24 hour session of browsing after clicking your referral link to Amazon.
I’m unsure how many tracking IDs you can create in your account, and as far as I’m aware and can tell, you cannot pass specific UTM codes or other identifying information along with a click to Amazon that is passed back to you on the reporting side. Meaning, you could track users you send to Amazon, and where you’re sending them, and you can see outcomes, but Amazon only provides the tracking ID back to you as a reference (this ID is meant to be used on a site/channel wide level, but as I mentioned above could possibly be abused depending on how many you can create)
I got lucky, the subdevelopment I live in has been upgraded from classic Centurylink DSL to “Spectrum” fiber (1gbps fiber line to the house for $60/month, no contract and no equipment or setup fees. Growing up a few blocks away, it was a comcast subscription or a 1mbps DSL line(~10yrs ago).
It’s awesome when a competitor can enter the market.
Not too difficult! Monetized with ads, the project was making a significant profit (>$15k per year; all of it came in on one day) - the difficult part was trying to do anything else with all of those users.
In high school I made a site to help students view their AP scores early. It ballooned in popularity over the past 8 years. At it’s peak in 2020 and 2021 it was getting over 1.5 million students in 2 hours on the day of release. It was quite profitable for a side project I started in high school. Sadly I was never able to turn it into anything more than an early scores site on the day of score release, but now all AP scores come out at the same time and the site is fading away to being forgotten.