For Quarter 3 I’ve chosen this article written by Ting Yu from the The Brink, at Boston University.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/how-copyrights-patents-trademarks-may-stifle-creativity-and-progress/

This article was written in August of 2022. It establishes and idea that law has not been able to keep up with the development of the digital era. This idea, proposed by Jessica Silbey, an expert on constitutional and intellectual property law argues that current law does nothing to advance the public’s creativity and ability to make society better for the collective, instead society lined up today to empower individuals and corporations. In other words, Silbey explains that the idea of individual copyright and trademarking of ones own work is more an empowerment to exclude, making copyright and trademark law seem more on the offensive than defensive.

The reason I decided that this article fit the bill for the semester is of course its relevance to our topics surrounding copyright law and trademarks of our work as programmers and developers. But at the same time I chose it for its interesting take on the implications of copyright law and trademarks on the creativity of the public.

Pulling down from the summary of the article about the empowerment to exclude being used to describe copyright and trademarks, at first it felt like a weird take but the more I thought about it the more it made sense to me. While at face value the idea of copyright and trademarks is to protect the intellectual property of whoever created said property, on the grand scheme of things, especially in a world where you can instantly contact someone from the other side of the planet in an instant it does feel more like a trademark plays the role of a bouncer at the entrance of a club, letting in select people and excluding others. Although the people not being the problem but the intentions of said people as trademarks and copyright determine what one can do with an intellectual property. Something specific that Silbey brings up that to me shows the severe issue with current law is the example about how in days long past, it was usually the inventor of something who would own the patent to said thing, but in todays world its teams of people working all towards a single goal, usually in competition with other companies. Leaving copyright and trademarks usually in the hands of the company the team is operating under depending on contract stipulations. For example the battle between Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo to be the next big innovator in the gaming industry creates hostile work environments powered by profit and quotas. Copyright and trademarks usually held tight with an iron fist by these companies. So while I do need to give this idea more thought I definitely think Silbey has a strong point that shes making for us.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Splaine CS Blog by Brady Splaine and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

My chosen source for my 2nd blog entry for CS-348 is: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0950584922001884#abs0001

Written in 2023, this article from ScienceDirect surrounds a set of 182 survey’s conducted on scrum team members to determine the influence maturity has on the effectiveness and success of a scrum team and their project. The relevance to seem is fairly self evident as college students can be a mixture of mature and immature which the article suggests could impact effectiveness of scrum teams in the classroom.

This leads me onto why I chose this article as my source, In an environment like our classroom, the maturity of the students and or even professor(s) involved can, as said in the relevance portion, could impact our scrum team effectiveness and efficiency. I decided this was a strong connection to make as people new to the scrum framework, cause while understanding scrum and knowing how it works is important, I do think team member maturity is important as well as it has effected my ability to work in teams in the past and be effective and efficient.

I like that this article provides a good explanation of scrum and what it’s advantages are, it gives context for those unfamiliar with scrum to understand where the article is headed, although I would argue you don’t need the context as the study this article dives into can most certainly apply to any kind of framework out there. As for reflecting on this material I want to pull back to where I mentioned the maturity of my teams in past group projects and tasks have most certainly effected the ability of myself and my team to be effective and efficient at completing our goals, this is initially why this material called out to me as I read it. Though as I read it, I started to compare those experiences with what we’re doing in CS-348 currently. While not working in scrum teams, our teams of 4 for working on our class exercises to learn scrum are a good comparison towards maturity’s impact on our ability to finish the work in a reasonable amount of time.
For example, my first team, we were decently good at getting our work done in a good period of time, but I will admit sometimes we could be a bit slow as we let our maturity slip up. Once we mixed the teams around I saw how much more maturity mattered as we all adjusted to the effectiveness of all our new team members. Some teams got slower, some got faster, while I’m not pinning the reason entirely on maturity, I do think it’s a large influence. I also think its important that our teams got swapped around not just so we learned to work with new people but so we could learn to properly adjust and adapt to our changing environments.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Splaine CS Blog by Brady Splaine and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

My chosen article for this blog post is this article from the National Institutes of Health.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4945047/

While at face value an article from the NIH might seem completely off topic from our class and what we’re learning currently, this article is actually all about Github. The article is centered around the Bioinformatics industry, and how a big problem with it has always been sorting, storing and accessing biological data and information credibly and easily. The introduction of the article gives a solid run down of what Github is and its relation to Git, while the meat of the article surrounds 10 “rules” to follow while using Github.

I chose this article for my first blog post of the semester because it seemed ironically fitting for the current topic of Git in our class for being an article published by the NIH. But I also chose it because it heavily relates to our sort of beginners guided usage of Git and Github that we’ve been doing. The rules given by the article all seem like really helpful guidelines for anyone new to Github like I am. I’ve always wanted to use it for personal projects and such but it’s always seemed like a daunting platform. Granted our class has torn down a large portion of the wall getting in my way from using Github personally but I do also really like these guidelines given by the article. For example, their rule 1, using Github to track your projects progress and changes make to the project, that taking advantage of its own system for doing so is a massive help from tracking progress on ones own, especially when working with a whole team of people on one project.

Out of all these rules though, I really do think rule 5 and 7 are the ones I reflect on most, I’ll admit I’m sometimes lazy and sometimes forgetful. Sometimes I do skip a test on a project. But that’s where I realize I can use that to my advantage with rule 5 of this article. It talks about using Github’s web hooks to test your code, find bugs and detect logic errors every time you push your code. Personally I don’t think it’s advantage I would pass up and don’t want to pass up in the future of using Github for class and myself.

As for rule 7, I know it seems silly but I don’t really like to discuss or bring up problems or issues I have with my projects that I’m working on. It’s always seemed like such a hassle, and whenever I did discuss the issues I’m having, its usually over discord to multiple people at once making responses to each person a mess of trying to keep up and take everything into consideration. So genuinely I do think the issues section of a project will become a very powerful tool for me. It didn’t really hit me in class because actively trying to use it as someone identifying and fixing problems for a project that wasn’t my own felt discouraging, not sure why, but I didn’t really think about from the project lead perspective. I do think a tab dedicated to finding, analyzing and fixing issues will be extremely helpful to me.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Splaine CS Blog by Brady Splaine and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.