Nupjuk!

created: 2021.05.20. 15:00 · modified: 2021.12.24. 14:39 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

Not long ago, Nupjuk! passed 1,400 active users. Assuming only a small number of them are graduate students, that means about 40% of KAIST undergraduates are using it. To mark the occasion, I wanted to share a few stories about Nupjuk! today.*

[4] As of the 21st, the record for active users is 1,420. The user count has grown by about 50 over the past month. That’s much, much slower than in early March, when it was growing by 100 a day, but it’s still climbing steadily.

[5] Whenever a new version comes out, the program updates on all those computers within a day or two. Another interesting thing about this graph is how regularly the number of launches drops sharply and then recovers. Sure enough, those dips are weekends. There was barely a dip on the weekend in the third week of April, during midterms, while the following weekend saw the biggest drop.

[6] Macs account for about 13% of the computers on campus running Nupjuk!. That’s much higher than their share nationwide (about 8%), but lower than I expected. Linux accounts for a full 2%—roughly three times its nationwide share.

[7] In March, I got an email from someone overseas asking me to sell my extension. Nothing in the email specifically identified Nupjuk!, so it seemed like a mass email sent to the developers of promising extensions. I had no intention of selling, so I didn’t reply. Thinking about it now, though, I should at least have asked how much they were offering.

[8] I haven’t made any money from it, but I’m grateful that a few people have sent me gift vouchers. Some sent them just after version 2.0 came out to say how much they enjoyed using the program; others sent them to thank me for adding features they’d requested. Thank you for all the vouchers—I’ve enjoyed them, or will soon!

[9] I also got an email from the student council. They were planning to gather students’ complaints about the new LMS and pass them on to the university, and asked whether they could include Nupjuk! as a reference. Of course I said yes. They also asked if I had any other feedback. I’d been so disappointed while looking into KLMS that I wrote back with something bordering on a complaint. Now that I know who’s developing KLMS, I regret that a bit. I’d assumed some outside development company had been paid a lot of money to build it; I never imagined two university staff members were handling the development themselves. I hope the student council softened my feedback before passing it on, and that the university takes the LMS project more seriously going forward.

[10] Finally, here’s one of the reviews Nupjuk! received. It’s the greatest compliment of my life.

* For anyone who doesn’t go to our university: Nupjuk! is a Chrome extension that makes KAIST’s LMS easier to use. KLMS was revamped this semester and still has many unfinished parts. It will gradually improve, but students who use the system every day have to deal with the inconvenience in the meantime. So I added the features shown in [2–3], along with color themes, vectorized icons, and more, to the KLMS VOD Controller I’d developed late last year, hoping to minimize that inconvenience. I renamed it, too: the new name comes from Nupjuk[1], KAIST’s mascot.

Originally posted on Instagram on May 21, 2021