Neil+Von+Flatern

Dave wishes he got BIG MONEY.
Neil Von Flatern: Playing for keeps since 1989.

11/22/2010

For this blog I'm going to talk about what i've learned so far and my thoughts on it. I wasn't able to make the hackfest, but from what I've heard about it it yielded good results. Open Source Software provides a really helpful learning environment for the most part, because the people we've worked with have been very helpful and were more than glad to point us in the right direction.

We met Mel Chua, who is an EXTREMELY energetic and fun girl who works for redhat. She was great at explaining how the OSS world worked in a fun environment. I'm sad she couldn't have stayed longer, but I suppose she does have a real job to get back to haha.

Also, The kid from Odin College (Whose name escapes me now) gave a really great lecture on packaging. Him and Mel really had fun in the presentation and it really made me feel like I'd fit in well in an OSS community. Overall it seems like an extremely warm environment, and the fact that we're already connected to some already well immersed people in the community really gives us a strong foothold to continue our OSS careers should we choose to do so.

I feel like we didn't really learn all about what the project did before we got into it. We were kinda just thrown into it and told to write documentation about it, which isn't easy to do. We managed to figure it all out though, and overall despite the hectic work environment, OSS seems like fun.

10/18/2010

So, being farther into the whole Software Engineering course, I must say I'm a little disappointed. Obviously knowing how to write proper documentation is important, but I was really hoping to get into a lot of the coding base for this project. Coding is the one thing I really wanted to embed in my system (no pun intended). I just hope we will do //some// coding by the end of the semester because that was really the only reason I took the course.

That being said, the documentation process on things such as requirements and design are important to know. It's a very rigid structure and I assume it will relate strongly to real world documents I will have to write. Although, it's very difficult for me to understand what I'm writing when I don't have legitimate code to write or my own idea, which I feel both of which are necessary to really write your own document. I don't even know much about the legitimate specifications required of caribou so writing these assignments is difficult and I feel like it's often graded fairly intensely given the amount of experience we've had with this OSS environment.