On May 22nd, CRLS students were notified that the beloved student-developed grade website, Aspine, was back online after months of the program being down and, before that, unreliable. Through the diligent focus of the CRLS Cybersecurity Club, Aspine is back in service and able to be used by CRLS students to predict their grades, calculate GPAs, or view their scores in a more visually pleasing medium compared to Aspine’s counterpart, Aspen. Students across CRLS are excited for Aspine’s return. Sophia Juanes Seto ’26 expressed to the Register Forum, “I am so happy at the news, Aspine is such a valued resource!”
Cybersecurity Club members Elias Seidman ’24 and Ari Lavine ’25 led the revival of Aspine. Following Aspine’s closure at the beginning of this year, Seidman told the Register Forum, “I was infuriated that Aspine was gone … I thought it might be a good idea to troubleshoot the errors.’” Co-builder Lavine expressed to the Register Forum, “With Aspine being open source, it felt doable to revive it, as we wouldn’t have to rebuild it from scratch.” With the rest of Cybersecurity Club, Lavine and Seidman overcame challenges with Aspine file URLs and parent website. In order for Aspine’s code to be usable, Lavine told the Register Forum that “the sign-in method had to be changed and the way we grabbed data from Aspen had to be reworked.” further complicating the process.
Founded in 2019 by Cole Killian ’19 and Max Katz-Christy ’19, Aspine is an integral part of the student academic community. Aspine, which was created using open-source software, was created so everyone has the ability to edit or redistribute the website in accordance with its licensing regulations. The temporary Aspine shutdown seen in 2024 is not the first of its kind; just a few weeks after the site launched in 2019, administrators took Aspine down due to privacy concerns regarding its direct connections to personal data from Aspen. After discussing with ICTS (Information, Communications and Technology Services) and ensuring data privacy protection and student integrity preservation, Aspine was back up by late 2019. Although rumors circulated that the most recent shutdown was due to similar issues or the fact that the original creators had since graduated, this was not the case. In an email to the Register Forum, Seidman attributed the shutdown to technical difficulties, saying, “it seems like something caused the URLs that contain Aspen data to switch to a different format, so Aspine couldn’t find any of the data.” Lavine added that “Aspen’s API [Application Program Interface] changed the way you needed to authenticate and changed most of its endpoints.” Whatever the reason may be, completing this project was no easy feat and will greatly help hundreds of CRLS students schoolwide.
After nearly an entire semester without it, students are grateful that Aspine is back in full swing! Cecilia Prasanna ’26 thanks the Cybersecurity Club for their dedication: “Aspine is such a valuable resource for CRLS students, and I’m so happy it’s back for students to use!”
