One of the main reasons for this frequent posting is for my Software Engineering Practicum (CSCI 462) class at the College of Charleston, but I will also be using this blog to update on my own personal research (my next post will be reflecting upon this for a bit as I am attending a conference).
The project that I completed during my last semester for software engineering is geared to be presented at the School of Sciences and Mathematics poster session in the upcoming months, but, for the time being, I have a new group to work with for the new semester.
My team:
- Me
- Jake Dierksheide
- Jacob Song
- Albert Nardonne
We talked and have decided that we would all like to work on the Galaxy project (just like my team from last semester did). I believe this semester will go over a lot easier because Jake and I have a lot of experience working with Galaxy as our own research utilizes a local instance of Galaxy that we customize and expose to the Web. Since we, as a group, want to work on Galaxy we came up with the team name "Team Rocket" - this name should not necessitate much explanation but we were all happy with it.
A few readings that I have done for Software Engineering encompass a few, relatively simple topics. For example, before class the other day I had no notion of what the idea of a "planet" was when it came to software, but it is really nothing more than an aggregator for blog feeds written in python. Also, I read the first two chapters of an open source textbook for teaching open source projects, explaining significance of open source, etc. and the book can be located here.
Some examples of things I gathered from this book so far: FOSS (free and open source) projects and contributing to them is a great way to gain experience as a developer (even if just contributing documentation), add to a resume, and become associated with an open source community, which is huge in this day-and-age. Also, version control is really at the heart of FOSS because it is what allows multiple developers to work on the same parts of projects without running into conflicts that could result in a waste of time that would trudge up the development process. Ultimately, these introductory chapters are talking about the application of software development techniques that I have gained throughout last semester (and time before that with my own workings), such as the notion that no code is bug-free. Additionally, the software development lifecycle is an important concept to keep in mind - code has to evolve or else be a slave to devolution that results in a crummy piece of software that could only, at best, become a piece of clunky legacy software.
My next blog will be coming to Blogger from Toronto, Canada as Jake Dierksheide and I (under the guidance of Dr. Paul Anderson) are presenting at the 2014 5th International Conference on E-Education, E-Business, E-Management, and E-Learning (IC4E 2014) and details about the conference can be located here. I will be presenting on Tuesday during the afternoon session.
Music listened to while blogging: Spotify radio (based off of Hopsin)
No comments:
Post a Comment