It has been a few weeks since I have updated regarding my status on this project, and I apologize for that. It has been a serious challenge trying to get the proper set up in order to work on the OpenMRS Radiology Module. Our group has been plugging along at it every week trying to troubleshoot and determine what piece of the puzzle is missing to get things up and running. My computer in particular is having an issue that when the software is up and running, and all necessary services are running, the page cannot be found. The interesting thing about this issue is that it is inconsistent. For example, sometimes restarting the computer will fix it; sometimes nothing will fix it; and other times it works fine with no problems. I have not been able to get this running consistently enough to be able to use my computer for development to work on the OpenMRS module. The past few sessions I have been attempting to assist other team members in getting a successful version running on their computer.

One of the issues that our group was having is a problem where it cannot locate the Java JDK. This issue was resolved by an unknown solution. A few people were having problems with ports that were not available. The solution to this problem was properly shutting down using vagrant halt rather than using the Virtual Machine controls to shut down the machine.

My current plan is to continue to attempt to get everything running on my computer and hopefully be able to get some coding in! It has been sort of frustrating trying over and over the same methods to attain no results. I truly believe that if I were to do a factory reset to my computer I would be able to get it going, but I am not willing to completely erase all of my data at this point even with a backup.

Chapter 2 of clean code deals with learning how to say no in a professional environment. The chapter is very helpful in the sense of giving example of exactly why you should never commit yourself to something that you will not be able to carry out completely. If you overbook yourself and commit to jobs that you are not able to complete you will create a chain of problems that will come back to you later in the future. The moment that you tell your boss that you can “possibly” get something done, the expectations have been set at the point and there will now be disappointment and possibly consequences depending the the importance of the project that you are working on. It is also a let down to your team when you begin to commit to things that cannot be done because you will often drag others down with you.

However, this does not mean that you should not take on tasks that will challenge you because life should be comfortable and easy. By all means if you know for a fact that the task being asked of you is something that can be tackled, than DO IT! Showing that your team can perform on demand and have fantastic outputs is a great thing, but it is very important to ensure you do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of. It really all comes down to a very simple phrase by a very wise man..

“Do; or do not. There is no trying.” – Yoda

Chapter 1 of the clean coder written by Robert C . Martin covered a number of topic that apply to workers as they enter their professional work environment. The transition between being a student and a being a professional in the work field is a tremendous difference. Responsibility is probably the most significant factor regarding working in a professional environment. Anything that you say, do, or create is directly attached to you, and you should take pride in the things that you do. With this being said it is very important that you stay up to date with things and be sure that your work is something worth sending out for other people to see. In order to stay up to date with the changing times and technology, it requires you to take a good portion of your own time and do further reading and studying in your field. Spending time outside work to further your career is a very good investment of time because it will allow you to increase your skills, while at the same time making yourself a much more marketable employee for future employers who could potentially hire you. Your work should not be faulty to Quality Assurance. What this means is that you should not be known as the person who always has issues when the code is send off to be tested. You want to be known as the person that has the code that is impossible to find problems with.

All in all this was a very good chapter and I really enjoyed the reminder of learning outside of work and being sure to exercise pride and caution in everything that you do.

Setting up the environment necessary to run OpenMRS on my system turned out to be quite the process. I think that the major reason that it gave me so much trouble was all of the previous years of “stuff” that had gathered on my laptop. I have a Macbook Pro running OS X El Captain.

The installation procedure was relatively straight forward. You begin the process by downloading the OpenMRS repository from git hub and storing it in your desired location. After downloading is complete you build OpenMRS using Maven, and begin to set up the server. Once at this point, you navigate into the directory with the server and start it up. If this runs for you without complaining about anything, that wala! Your almost done! Mine however had many issues that were preventing it from installing. Many of my issues had to do with things that needed to be updated and properly assigned (i.e. Java). Once the server is going you need to install a GUI that you can use to interact with the OpenMRS system. For the purposes of this class we installed the Legacy UI.

For me the one issue that was continuously surfacing was the Java on my machine not lining up with the Java that the compiler was searching for. After many struggles and much consulting I finally got the Java pointing to the right directory. Once this was corrected everything ran perfectly, and there were no further errors.

Starting up this blog to begin sharing things that I learn along my Computer Science journey. I will be contributing to OpenMRS this semester as part of my senior capstone project. Looking forward to a great year!