Wso on nsf.name

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):

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).