Zachary Hamed ’14, a former HCS member, delved into the archives of “HCS-jobs”—a mailing list for technical recruiters to advertise employment opportunities and students to find partners for side projects—and said that the oldest emails he could find were from 2000, around the year group members estimate was the starting point of HCS’s mailing list administration.

Today, HCS’s database holds more than 160,000 unique email addresses, though that count includes addresses for graduated students and fake or incorrect addresses that have not been pruned out, according to Xiao.

“We touch everything and have a massive reach at Harvard,” Xiao said.

According to James H. Waldo, Harvard’s chief technology officer and HCS’s faculty advisor, HUIT has no “official” relationship with the club, but does house its servers and pays for the “minimal” cost of providing electricity to the machines. As an advisor, Waldo said he connects the undergraduates with faculty members who have appropriate expertise when the group seeks guidance, but has no role in how they manage or administer the club.

“They are a non-professional organization doing a professional job,” Waldo said. He added that in his personal view, he appreciates that a student organization could put up its website without University oversight or bureaucracy.

While the scale of the operation is a constant challenge, board members say that the experience of administering student lists and websites mimics a professional setting that cannot be found elsewhere on campus.

“HUIT has given us a fantastic opportunity. There would be no other way for students to interact with such a wide-ranging systems base except through HCS,” Zou said. “I have really appreciated the learning experience.”

Deshpande echoed Zou’s sentiment, saying that his time working with the student organization was “an experience pretty difficult to get outside of working at a company.”

NEAR CAPACITY

As the number of student lists has proliferated over the years and email volume has increased, HCS members say their system’s current hardware and software iteration has been under increasing stress. That has translated into more issues for the members of the five-man management board to address.

For example, Xiao said that the help request mechanism for users to notify the group of a malfunctioning service or for assistance on a technical problem has an estimated three-month backlog.

“We are getting near the capacity of what we can handle in terms of clubs,” Xiao said. “I could imagine one to two full-time people just working on this, or another full-time person whose main job is to manage servers for Harvard’s clubs.”

Part of the problem is that the club is still running six-year-old software, which likely contributed to Virgil’s failure, according to Deshpande.

“It’s been increasingly difficult to maintain it especially since it’s getting more costly to provide replacement parts,” Deshpande said. “It’s like buying an old car. People also no longer send out patches to fix bugs in the software.”

In the meantime, the aspiring engineers have found ways to mitigate the capacity problem until they can completely rebuild the database from the ground up. According to Xiao, the current database reaches 95 percent of capacity at the end of each day, so the club runs a set of instructions which delete junk data. This high volume puts the database at risk of crashing if hackers clog one of its hosted sites.