At the University where I work, there’s always a ton of Professional Development activity going on around campus, most of which is centered on training sessions for which people can register. That has always been an arduous, labor-intensive process, with real live humans handling every aspect of managing those registrations — reporting on class sizes, processing registrations, processing cancellations, maintaining a waiting list, communicating with attendees, etc.

To ease that chore, I’ve started work on a piece of software that manages all of those common tasks, driven by the requirements of our training organizations. So far, it allows a user to register for a class, cancel a reservation, subscribe to a webcal calendar that shows the training for which she has registered, download an ICS file to put the event on an existing calendar, receive email confirmations of registrations, to sign up for the waiting list for classes that are full, and to receive email notification when they get moved from the waiting list to the class roster. It’s also the most rigorously test-driven development I’ve done to date, so the code should be of good quality.

I’m managing it as an open-source project, so if you’re comfortable with Ruby on Rails and are interested in jumping in, or would like to download a copy to fool around with, you can visit the project on Google Code. I’d be delighted to have other contributers if it turns out to scratch anybody else’s itch as well. It is still very much geared toward folks who know a little bit about Rails and are willing to customize it to their needs. If that’s not you, you might want to steer clear for now.