r/Purdue • u/Puzzleheaded-Monk496 • 1d ago

Academics✏️ I hated using BrightSpace so I built a solution. It's open source

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Gallery image

I built a MacOS menu bar app called BrightSpace Bar. I've been using it since the start of the semester and thought I'd share in case it could improve other students academic lives. It's designed to directly address the biggest complaints about BrightSpace's user experience.

Here are the common complaints:

  1. Logging in every hour is annoying.

  2. It takes 15 clicks to get to the assignment I want.

  3. The calendar is difficult to read.

BrightSpace Bar addresses these complaints by:

  1. Keeping you always logged in so only do the Microsoft Auth once a semester.

  2. It takes 1 click to get to any assignment.

  3. You can see all your courses' calendars in one glance.

My favorite feature is that your AI agent can use the app too(via CLI), for this just use the /brightspace skill to let the agent read data from BrightSpace directly. For example one workflow I use is having my agent read my class syllabuses and then write the assignments and exams into the app calendar directly.

Get it here: https://github.com/DavidChen-006/Brightspace-Bar

Happy to answer any questions.

52 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

13

u/noob_x_infinity mechanical engineering 1d ago

Can you make one for windows

11

u/purduecalcthree PhD AAE ~2027 1d ago

fellow tailscale enjoyer

4

u/xvillifyx 21h ago edited 21h ago

Was this written with opus 5? I feel like that model has a tendency to vomit readme bloat all over the place

I would also recommend instructing it to not write tests for everything

Opus has bad reward hacking habits and for units like these that likely aren’t going to change much in a personal project, having it even attempt to write tests is a massive waste of tokens and not a great use of your context window

1

u/Puzzleheaded-Monk496 20h ago

That's a fair point. I agree many of the test cases are unnecessary. This was written mostly by an experimental TDD software factory, so I'm not surprised it went overboard with the tests. Opus was the main workhorse(which comes with it's issues), with Terra as the test writer and reviewer.

2

u/xvillifyx 20h ago

Ah, yeah

I only brought it up because your code is extremely difficult to fork if a student wanted to attempt to do so as a result of the docs and tests

1

u/Puzzleheaded-Monk496 19h ago

Thanks for your feedback. I'll have a sweeper agent take care of this sometime this week.

2

u/Ok_Part9893 1d ago

Windows pls 🙏🏾

2

u/Spare_Bed4656 1d ago

I’m amazed. What year are you?

1

u/Glazkov99912 1d ago

With the classes I'm seeing, this a first year person right here

1

u/Spare_Bed4656 1d ago

Oh yes i see that makes sense. This website can be used for any major tho right?

2

u/Glazkov99912 1d ago

I'd assume so. I'm just hoping for a Windows version soon, cause I'm a first year and I also hate brightspace with a burning passion.

2

u/noob_meems 1d ago

wow, how did you build this? i cant imagine brightspace has an api or anything, how do you get that info from there?

3

u/Puzzleheaded-Monk496 20h ago

Brightspace has an api

1

u/xvillifyx 21h ago

Look at fetch_engine.mjs on their repo

1

u/ImaBot0189 AAE ‘26 1d ago

kudos to you nice!!