Blog on nsf.name

Raise the Ceiling, Beware the Floor

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:11:18 -0700

During March of 2026, the Williams Record was inundated with a flurry of vitriolic, near-identical op-eds covering the topic of AI in the classroom and our society. I did not feel I had anything new to add to the AI debate, but rather I saw it as a symptom of a much broader, older dilemma that has plagued pedagogy for decades: the debate about how much we should allow automation to replace our learning. So I wrote an article about it and published it to the Williams Record, which is what follows below.

Rewriting WSO Mobile in Swift

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:59:16 -0500

At Williams College, most student technological services run through an organization called WSO¹, for common tasks like checking the course calendar, dining hall menus, rating professors, trading textbooks, and more. Since the college doesn’t provide its own app, that means our app is the standard app for the ~2,000 students who are active students.

Around December of 2025, I began to realize that we should aspire to do better than our current trainwreck of an app. The last time that WSO’s aging mobile app was rewritten before the rewrite that I am about to discuss here was all the way back in 2016, meaning the current mobile app was made of nearly a decade of unmaintained trash. I can’t even begin to explain how bad this actually was²:

Williams Record: WSO Mobile

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 15:17:01 -0700

In the February 11th, 2026 issue of the Williams Record¹, there was an article about the new version of WSO Mobile, which had an interesting development cycle. The Williams Record interviewed me about this and published an article about it; I am archiving it here verbatim for historical purposes (in case the original site goes down).

Melania Espinal/The Williams Record

A new version of the Williams Students Online (WSO) mobile app was released for all iOS devices on Jan. 26. According to an email from President of WSO Nathaniel Flores ’27, the release marked the first time the app has been updated in six years.

The WSO Server Migration, Part 2

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:41:25 -0500

Previously on WSO…

The big challenge last time that kept me from finally moving everything over to the new server was LISTSERV. This ancient piece of email software dates back to the Paleolithic¹, and is a maintenance nightmare precisely because it’s annoying to get data out of.

Adding to this burden was cPanel, another nasty fossil that needed to be relegated to the past. Unfortunately cPanel also had all of the configuration for exim and LISTSERV in it, so the big task would be figuring out how to extract it from the running server in a way that is safe, and then reinstalling as much of the mail archives and list data as possible onto the new server.

The WSO Server Migration, Part 1

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:00:00 +0000

Introduction

First, a bit of context: WSO, officially Williams Students Online, is a project started in 1995 at Williams College to provide student online services that the college was either unwilling or unable to provide for the community (such as FacTrak, an early predecessor to services like “Rate My Professor”). Amazingly, it had been hosted on nearly the same hardware for about a decade now, and has mutated to the point where it is hardly recognizable as a classic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP):

Daily Japanese Study: 2025

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 19:00:00 +0000

Background

Sometimes an accidental decision has interesting second-order consequences that you really don’t see coming. One of them was being dropped from my intended class during my first-year fall and having to take JAPN 101 instead. Unexpectedly, I found that I quite liked the challenge, and soon I found myself increasingly invested in something I had never originally intended doing:

Fall of 2023: JAPN 101, starting to quite like the grammar challenges, investing increasingly more time into the language.
Winter of 2023/2024: JAPN 99 (Winter Study) course, applying to Japanese summer intensive programs, getting into KCJS!
Spring of 2024: APN 102, begin assembling my own Anki deck (Zipf’s Law sorted collection of coursework vocabulary), finishing Genki 1 and 2 in my free time to be ready for the summer.
Summer of 2024: Complete KCJS, which is effectively equivalent to completing JAPN 201-202 at my school.
Fall of 2024: Then JAPN 301, which is the single hardest humanities course I have ever taken.

Then something shifted in my thinking around the winter of 2024. By that point, Japanese study was so engrossing that I had to make the call to prioritize what mattered most: my Geosciences studies. What drove me to make this choice was because I realized that a class I really wanted to take in Geosciences conflicted with the time offerings for Japanese, and that taking both would effectively be an overwhelming workload that would prevent success in either course.

Williams Record: WSO Interview

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:45:29 -0700

In the September 17th, 2025 issue of the Williams Record¹, there was an article about the changes that had been going on to WSO, as at the time that I had joined the board officially it was somewhat in a state of disrepair and in need of some fixes. I was interviewed and I want to preserve what the Williams Record published about it; I am archiving this interview here verbatim for historical purposes (in case the original site goes down).