Coursicle co-founder issues explanation

Joe Puccio, responsible for deluge of notifications, discusses struggles and mental health empathy

By ISA SHEIKH

a ssociate news e ditor students across campus received the puzzling push notifications in early 2022, which ranged from soliciting nude pictures of Zendaya to raging against big Tech figures like mark Zuckerberg. according to coursicle cofounder Joe puccio, over 60% of notre dame students use the app. This is the second campus where coursicle was introduced.

The notifications were sent through the class scheduling app coursicle, which helps students keep track of their schedules and set up notifications about closed and waitlisted classes. The app underwent outages during the period.

Though he doesn’t shy away from being an eccentric, puccio says there was far more at play in the notifications and outage. puccio released an essay called “an explanation” on his personal website Thursday, which marked the one-year anniversary of the meltdown. he paints a more complicated picture of the circumstances around last February, describing his experiences of a manic episode.

“one year ago today i was admitted to the hospital for disorganized thinking, unbounded elation and highly risky behavior. i was sending crude, lewd, and bizarre push notifications to hundreds of thousands of college students,” he writes in his explanation. “i was sleeping two hours a night while writing essays. and i nearly bankrupted my company when i tried to spend $1.2 million dollars on an ad attacking mark

Zuckerberg. news coverage only motivated me to continue.” puccio co-founded coursicle as an undergraduate at the university of north carolina (unc), where he graduated in 2016.

“when i was an incoming freshman at unc, i spent like seven hours planning my class schedule, and when i went to register for my classes, i only got into one of the five i needed to take,” puccio told The observer, speaking from an office in new york city. “and so that night, i wrote a program that would notify me when a class i wanted had an open seat. and then my friends suggested opening up to other students.” slowly but surely, the program spread from campus to campus. puccio said much of the brunt work was around publicity and