This was Schooltraq

Schooltraq was an online academic planner for high school and college students. I developed it mostly in 2009-2011 (when I was 12-14 years old and in middle school). I then let it operate, untouched, for over 13 years. I shut it down in 2025.

Schooltraq homepage
Schooltraq dashboardSchooltraq dashboard

Thank you to everyone who used (or was forced by their parents to use) this product. 30,000+ people used it at some point in its 15 year history, and a good number of them for years at a time. Hundreds of teachers recommended it and many school districts even deployed it across all their students.

This was one of the earliest things I ever built. After I offered a "supporters" tier, it was (other than mowing neighborhood lawns) my first income and my first Stripe merchant account. I'll always cherish the memories.

Everything about Schooltraq was from a different era: I remember picking textures for the homepage; deciding the amount of screenshot tilt; and agonizing over each gradient. Things looked different back then.

One cool feature was Reflex, a "natural language" system for adding homework. You could type something like "Essay in English tomorrow" and it would just figure everything out. It was years before I saw something like it in comparable todo apps.

And because I didn't get an iPhone until I became an adult, it only ever had an Android app.

Although it continued to function well, Schooltraq is clearly an aged relic on the modern web. In 2023, I refunded and canceled all active paid subscriptions but kept the service running. As of 2025, Schooltraq is shut down and now redirects to this in-memoriam page.

Fun facts

  • I first created Schooltraq in sixth grade as a way to procrastinate a science fair project.
  • Most of the code was written in the summers of 2009 and 2010, when I brought a clunky Dell laptop to my local public library and got to work. I think many people do not think of libraries as the "OG" coworking spaces but, for precocious kids (can I call myself that?), they are true WeWorks.
  • My longest subscription was 7 years, someone who faithfully used it through high school and then college. I am grateful to be a part of their journey.
  • Schooltraq was a particular favorite for high school and university academic support programs. On the day I shut it down in 2025, I noticed it was still written in the curriculum for numerous universities including Western Kentucky University, Roger Williams University, BYU Pathways, Northwest Missouri State University, and more. To all of you, thank you for your trust.
  • Credit card disputes are a fact of life for subscription products and the truth is they are typically not worth the time to fight. When someone disputed to their bank that they never used the product, however, I came with receipts and usage logs and won the dispute. The product was free! They could have just canceled! It wasn't about the $20, it was about the principle.

Nerdy facts

  • Schooltraq was written in jQuery, PHP, and CodeIgniter. Any live updates were done the hard way; no virtual DOM here! The mobile web app was written using jQuery Mobile.
  • When I decided to implement payments so people could pay me, Stripe the payment processor had just launched. It was a small startup and a relatively controversial choice over PayPal. I remember telling my middle school classmates about how "developer friendly was the way to go" over lunch break. This was not an easy conversation for others to participate in.
  • After the summer of 2011, I never touched the code again. In fact, I don't even know where the source code is. Despite this, Schooltraq was fine and the service has chugged on with almost no downtime at all. Why do we overcomplicate software?
  • Reflex was a single, very long JavaScript function. My dad, a classic C++ object-oriented programmer, saw it over my shoulder one day and forced me to refactor it. I refused and he held it against me for years. Now that we have a word for this (functional programming), I think I may have won.