Live TTC Tracking Data

Some exciting news happened today. As you may or may not know, I’m a TA for CSCD08, a software engineering course at UTSC. Its pretty much one of the BEST courses you can take, as a computer science student at UTSC. Why? Because you actually get to make something. All through your undergrad, you pretty do simple little programs, like “linked list”, or “binary sort tree”. In d08, you get to build something big, with a team, something that could actually be used in the industry.

When I did the course last year, I had to build an online photo editor. This was actually before photoshop express came out and destroyed the competition. There were four teams, and only two of them (mine included) decided to use a framework. We built it using a LAMP stack, with django as our web framework, and dojo as our javascript framework.  My team and I were actually able to do a pretty good job. It was even better then the best online photo editor available at the time.

So imagine my enthusiam, at being able to TA the course this year. The professor and I discussed a few new projects for the students to do, and he had actually managed to find Live TTC Tracking Data! So the project this year, was to use the Live TTC Tracking Data to create an online application, to help predict when busses would arrive at each stop.

The students completed their projects 2 weeks ago, and just today, it exploded. We contacted TTC about our project, and the next thing we know, nextbus (the source of the live TTC tracking data) released their version! This really excited the d08 students, so next thing we know, the entire class starts advertising and broadcasting their projects through the internet! I think Twitter was the funnest one. 6 new guys signed up for twitter, and started broadcasting it:

Which is pretty awesome! My favourite response however, was this one:

We’ve been tracking the visitors for every site, and it appears that citytv have been visiting it, even nextbus themselves in california. So hopefully it will bode well.

I guess that’s what makes d08 so awesome. Applications that are cutting edge, and can actually compete with real-world applications.

When my year did it, photoshop express came out 2 months later and slaughtered the competition. But this year? It appears my students are already ahead of the curve. Good luck guys!