My high school’s homework website left much to be desired in terms of usability, functionality, and intuitiveness. To address these problems without requiring teacher re-training or other involvement from the school’s administration, as a sophomore in high school, I reverse-engineered the existing homework website and provided an alternative interface to access. It grew quickly from a simple set of parsing algorithms and an HTTP proxy API for my personal use to a state-of-the-art personal productivity web app with wide adoption by my school community.
Keeba is a client-heavy single-page style web app which makes heavy use of JavaScript and CoffeeScript. The client embraces the modern JavaScript MVC pattern (through Backbone) and the server is a highly modularized set of internal and external APIs. Keeba uses makes heavy use of UNIX IPC and process forking to maintain a high degree of concurrency and avoid clogging the eventloop.