[IRC]
The IRC activity that we did in class was awkward to say the least. For starters, before going into further detail, I did not know people still used IRC in today’s age of the internet. It seems that it is extremely dated and only suited for some of the “hardcore” or old-school crowd that are stuck in the old ways. After downloading a few clients (experimenting with some proved to be more difficult or hard to navigate) I landed on one that was recommended to me by Brian Gibson — HexChat. After setting up the initial server and identity for myself, I connected pretty easily.
The whole conversation that took place afterwards was silently done inside the IRC. It gave me a first glimpse of how to use it and to speak my thoughts clearly via an online forum. The in-class lack of speaking was a little weird, but the exercise was meant to show us how to use it in case we could not meet for class. All in all, I think it was valuable even though I thought the method of doing online meetings was a little dated.
[Readings]
The readings for this week were a good statement to me personally as to how I could contribute more to the project. I do not believe I have anything much higher than an average programming level, nor do I have extensive knowledge into other languages and tools other than what I’ve used during my major progress at WSU. So joining this open source project seemed a little daunting. I did like to see that there were tons of other ways to contribute (I’m more keen to the documentation and bug tracking part). Some of the examples I could tell were a little “out there” in terms of how they were actually going to help, but I can see the end result of it all.
Reading about the bug tracking methods and etiquette was not 100% new information, seeing as I have worked in an environment before where bugs were coming up from clients and we were helping resolve them. For a programming aspect, though, it is applicable in almost the same way. I think the OpenMRS bug tracking feature is well developed (it has to be at the scale it is at this point) and should be easy to pick up on as bug tracking becomes part of the assignment.
From the blog slykrysis » cs-wsu by slykrysis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.