When several students at FHS started SchedLink, a website that tracks the schedule of the school day, they never thought it would achieve the success it did. While the original coding staff – mainly composed of now-graduated students – were working on the site, they implemented multiple features into it, such as puzzles, new themes, calendars and announcements for upcoming events.

     “Out of the team, I would say myself, Matt Ghera and maybe Patrick [Nusbaum] were the most involved,” Purdue freshman Gabriel Iskandar said. “We were always doing stuff with it. We would probably spend at least 3 hours every day doing something with SchedLink.”

     Purdue freshmen Matt Ghera and Dane Trainor came up with the idea for the website their junior year, and began the search for coders to help them build it. Ghera considered it lucky that they found Iskandar, as he did a lot of the work on the source code for the website. 

     “We did not expect people to actually use it in the beginning,” Ghera said. “Not only did we grow features-wise but we also learned a lot along the way and grew as an organization to much more than we thought we would’ve.”

     Now that most of the coders have graduated, they have handed off the site to the coding club, removed most of the features and left the website in its original state. They also allowed administrators to input schedules so that SchedLink would not require constant maintenance, and could still be functional in the years to come.

     “When I was there, when people spoke of SchedLink they held it very highly, which I found really touching,” Iskandar said. “It was really cool to see our website have such a positive impact on so many people when it wasn’t even, in my opinion, super revolutionary or anything. It’s really simple in what it’s doing, but it seems like so many people were able to connect over it.”