University students know the pain of trying to register for a class only to realize it’s full. At my university we didn’t even have a waitlist system for most classes. We had to resort to logging in and checking the site multiple times a day. This seemed like something a computer could do, so I set out to automate it with a bit of Python and the Twilio API.

Getting Started

Because the university’s course registration system is behind a password login, we’re going to use a simplified site I set up. For the purposes of this demo, it alternates each minute between having no open seats in CS 101 and having one open seat.