Tollab

A dozen tabs and zero answers

When I was at the Technion, my "schedule" was scattered across like six different places. The course site had one piece. My actual weekly timetable was somewhere else. Lecture recordings lived in their own separate system. And homework deadlines lived in my head, which, let's be honest, is not a reliable place to store anything. Every "wait, do I have a lecture right now?" turned into opening a pile of tabs and playing detective.

So I built the thing I wished existed: Tollab. Courses, weekly schedule, homework, lecture recordings, all in one spot, for me and anyone else at the Technion who was sick of juggling tabs. The name comes from "tullab," which is just Arabic for students. The subtitle says "For Technionez," which tells you how seriously I was taking myself.

What it actually does

You set up a semester, drop your courses in, and your week lays itself out as a color-coded grid. Homework gets tracked with due dates so the deadlines stop living rent-free in your head. You can pin your lecture recordings to each course, so the one you need to rewatch the night before an exam is right there instead of lost in some folder.

You don't have to type any of it in, either. Paste a link to your Cheesefork calendar and the whole semester imports itself, then each course quietly fills in its own details from the public Technion catalog. The part I'd want most as a student is the exam roadmap: it wakes up on its own two weeks before your first Moed and lays out A and B as a path, so the run-up stops being a vague cloud of dread and becomes a thing with a shape.

Everything lives in your browser first, so nothing you do waits on a server and a flaky connection doesn't interrupt you mid-edit. No account needed. Sign in with Google if you want it on your phone too and it syncs, but that's a choice rather than the price of entry.

Then I rebuilt the whole thing

Tollab started as plain JavaScript, the way a lot of things start: one file, then four, then a folder I was a bit afraid to open. It worked. It was also getting hard to change without breaking something two features away.

So the following summer I rewrote it from scratch in React and TypeScript. The rules are the boring kind I've come to like: the pure scheduling logic isn't allowed to know React exists, nothing reads the clock on its own so every countdown is deterministic and testable, and the import direction between layers is enforced by the linter instead of by me remembering. It's the same app to use. It's a completely different thing to work on.

Little touches I'm fond of

There's a ticker along the top that talks to you. It reads your actual week and comments on it, and when a semester has nothing in it yet, it tells you to "add one and let the chaos begin." None of it was necessary, but since I was building this for other students, it felt like the right spot to let some personality through. If you're going to stare at your schedule in dread anyway, it might as well say something funny back.