Automated Result Notifications: Getting Results Before the Official Announcement
· Pradeep Chandran M
Automation, Web Scraping, Python, Email API
Automated Result Notifications: Getting Results Before the Official Announcement We’ve all been there, the nerve-wracking wait for college semester results. Rumors fly around campus, WhatsApp groups blow up with "is it out yet?", and when the official announcement finally drops, chaos ensues. Thousands of students rush to the college portal at the exact same second, causing the servers to crawl to a halt or crash entirely. You end up staring at a loading screen for hours, your anxiety peaking with every failed refresh. I decided I didn't want to play the waiting game anymore. I wanted to solve this problem for myself and in the process, I ended up building an automated system that successfully delivered results to over 40 students minutes before the official announcement was even made. Here’s how I built a monitoring and notification pipeline that beat the crowd. The Motivation The goal was simple: Beat the traffic spike. To do this, I needed to know the exact moment the results were published, retrieve the data for myself and my friends, and distribute it all before the official circular was sent out and the server got hugged to death by thousands of panicked students. System Architecture The automation was broken down into a few distinct phases: 1. The Watcher (Monitoring the Portal) Universities rarely push the results and send the announcement at the exact same time. There’s usually a gap of a few minutes where the data is live, but the email hasn't gone out yet. I wrote a script to continuously monitor the SKCET results portal. The script intelligently checked for specific DOM changes or API endpoint availability that indicated the new semester's results were active. 2. The Trigger (Telegram Alert) The moment the script detected that the results were live, it fired a webhook to a Telegram Bot. This sent an instant push notification to my phone. I didn't have to sit at my computer hitting F5; my phone would just buzz the second the results were ready. 3. The…