Gradescope

Gradescope was the first serious application I ever participated in writing. It was basically a web app written in ASP.net with C# for code-behind, and MSSQL for the data layer. It was done by my four teammates (Megan, Neil, Mike, and Greg), and myself. The cool part about it was that we worked on this project before .NET was officially released, and none of us had ever used a database, or seen ASP, or C#.

Gradescope... It all started some time towards the end of the first semester of my senior year of high-school. Greg and I were spending another lunch in Mrs. Krane's classroom (that's our CS teacher), preparing for some of our upcoming academic competitions. Well, that's what we'd like to think: in reality, we were probably playing that scorched earth clone that Mike and I would also play during the AP CS classes, instead of doing useful work. Aaany way, Mrs. Krane stopped whatever it was she was doing and said to us matter-of-factly: "Hey, guys? You wanna go meet Bill Gates?" I was skeptical, and murmured something along the lines of "Yeah, right" in response, though Greg was quite ecstatic and assured her that we most certainly would like to.

Well, as it turned out, Microsoft was preparing a good show for the 2002 VsLive conference, to be held in San Francisco. They would officially release Visual Studio.NET 2002 on February 13, with fanfares, a keynote speech by Bill Gates, the whole nine yards. And they wanted a team of students to present a finished product written in VS.NET, so they could go like "Hey, see what a bunch of high-school kids can do? Now, imagine professional developers using this." Well, we were that team. And Gradescope was that project.

We went on to develop the whole thing in 5 or so weeks, while also having finals, academic competitions, and all that being our senior year of high-school - hence a certain degree of slackness. The presentation went through with great success, followed by interviews for all.

The presentation can still be checked out on the VsLive 2002 San Francisco site. There's a transcript and a video there somewhere. The Gradescope presentation goes somewhere just after the middle of the keynote speech.

And, of course, the obligatory photo with Bill Gates:

Looking back at the project in those times when I need to prepare a killer presentation for a job interview, I figure this must be the worst piece of code ever written. But then, I guess give any project a couple years, and it's code will seem that way.