History - nicolaschan/bell GitHub Wiki

A brief introduction

Bell is a website that counts down to the next time a school bell will ring. Bell is revolutionizing the field of event-driven organizational personal lifestyle full-stack distributed real-time education. Our clients include over one thousand full-time members of the American K-12 education system, and we are rapidly expanding to service the needs of higher education as well.

Why exactly is Bell valuable? A 1991 study by Bruce K. Britton and Abraham Tesser of the University of Georgia found that "Short-Range Planning also seems to predict grade point average"; insofar as our application facilitates "Short-Range Planning," Bell is an invaluable tool in creating a culture of successful temporal punctuality. The reactive frontend of Bell is used daily on about 1,000 devices, with over 2,000 total users (as counted by our Chrome extension (https://countdown.zone/xt)).

History

In late 2016, Bell was originally created by Nicolas Chan, a senior at Los Altos High School. Bell was also featured in the school newspaper.

For his senior project, Jonathan Shi developed a Chrome extension for Bell. Jonathan also wrote a blog post about this process.

Since then, Bell has been expanded to allow more custom schedules, although it still primarily targets LAHS. On October 24, 2017, the original website bell.lahs.club was switched over to countdown.zone to reflect this change.

Improvements to the code continue to be made. As an open source project, others are invited to contribute.

How it works today

In the case of Los Altos High School, Bell is not supported by or associated with the administration and is updated manually when special schedules are announced. Bell automatically synchronizes to the server time, but an adjustment can be added to compensate if the school bell rings a bit too early or too late. While those that update the schedule work hard to maintain Bell's reputation of reliability, it is possible that mistakes may happen.

Technical things that totally aren't buzzwords

Supported by "a fast, unopinionated, minimalist web framework for Node.js", Bell uses all the latest, fastest, and most secure open-source industry-standard web enterprise machine learning technologies. Except React. We don't have that yet.

Bell's state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure includes a Raspberry Pi 3 hosting a periodic real-time uniform synchronization server, a web server hidden behind "a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy", and a Redis database because reasons. Creating a multi-platform, dynamic service at the forefront of education technology is really just that simple.