Subversion & Me...

For the last week or so I've been reading the Subversion Book that was given to us as a resource in our CSCI 462 class. The book was a great intro into Subversion and I learned a lot just skimming the readings. As a result of reading the Subversion Book i ran into some terminology i have heard before, but never really understood. I took it upon myself to do some research and actually learned quite a bit. A good example of an item i was not familiar with was the idea of an "apache" server. I took some time to look up what this was all about and educated myself on the Apache HTTP server open source project and what it was used for. I have a feeling ill be running into this open source project in the future.


Quickly after skimming through some of the important areas of the Subversion Book I decided to explore some of the commands and play around with Subversion on my machine. I chose not to install a subversion client and just run my subversion commands through the Ubuntu terminal. In my opinion this is much faster and much more clean than having to deal with a SVN Client that might have a GUI. Not to mention I'm starting to like familiarizing myself with terminal commands in Ubuntu. The "Cirdles Playground" provided to us proved to be very useful for this. I played around with some basic commands such as "update", "commit", and "checkout". All of these commands seemed to work without a hitch.


I feel like Subversion is a very efficient system for collaboration. I'm excited to get to work with and develop my skills with it. I think knowing how to use Subversion will be a very important skill to have in the future with a career in the computer science field. 


Heres a little screen shot of my work for all who are interested:

Subversion Work Screenshot

P.S. On our "Cirdles Playground" someone decided to upload some Chuck Norris Facts...I'll leave you with a running list of some Here.

OpenMRS

For our project we chose OpenMRS. After exploring some of the development going on, I'm starting to get a real idea of how big this project actually is. This project has already been implemented in places like Nairobi and India. It's amazing to see how large these projects can actually grow. I emailed some of the leadership team and I am still waiting to hear back from someone on a recommended project to take on. There are lots of modules and little projects that need to be worked on from what I could tell. I am a little nervous about this project as our main project for the class though. It seems that most of the work for OpenMRS has been done and it is already being implemented. This could prove to be difficult to slide right into. I believe what will happen is we are going to be referred to the ticket system they have online. I have high hopes for the project and I hope to get involved soon.

Open Source?

As a Computer Science student, i am slowly becoming more familiar with the idea of open source software. Although i have used plenty of open source software before, I never had a real sense for what it was. As we move forward with the curriculum in this class i am becoming more and more familiar with how these projects work.

Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" really motivated me to contribute explore open source more deeply and to get a better idea of what open source actually is. Raymond discusses how open source compares to the idea of a "Bazaar", rather than the idea of a "Cathedral". The cathedral compares to projects that are meticulously planned out and have planned releases. The Bazaar compares to open source projects that are released often and have many developers. Raymond's exploration into why these "Bazaar" projects work is very interesting. I think that the exploration into social context and why developers actually tend to contribute is an interesting topic. Why do developers actually devote time to these projects? Raymond's explanations answered these questions well. "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" was a refreshing article and i think it renewed my interest in contributing towards a project for this class.


Class Progress:
Team Handicapped made progress by joining IRC channels for OpenMRS project. It seems that these channels are still very active and that development is still very much alive. Our team also joined mailing list. Funny to me, receiving these emails really reflect the "release and release often" phrase. I am getting about 3 to 4 emails every couple of hours. Seems like OpenMRS will be a valuable project.

Progress...

Thursday January 13 class consisted of exploring possible options for our FOSS projects that will be done throughout the semester.

On our team wiki are the possible projects that our group Team Handicapped discussed during class.

All of these FOSS projects are humanitarian projects. I find this to be very interesting and i feel like contributing to one of these important open source projects could be potentially very fulfilling. For example, working on a project such as OpenMRS, a medical records system, could help thousands of people.

I look forward to choosing a project and exploring what sort of options for contribution are available. Hopefully this project will develop my skills in the field of software engineering.

First Blog!

Here's my first blog for CSCI462. Hope to learn a lot in this class. I registered for POSSCON 2011 and received confirmation that my ticket was purchased. First Class consisted of breaking up into teams and team names. Our team is team Handicapped. Look for more coming from my blog as the semester moves forward.