[Wiki Editing]

This week’s learning on editing the Wiki page was actually very helpful and easy to pick up on. I can see why wikis are being more and more common for compiling information or for use as knowledge bases. I began by going to to the CS wiki and logging into my account. I wrote a brief description about me and then added a link to this page under the Students page. Editing in a wiki was incredibly easy to do and straight forward and I had no problem with it.

The Issue Tracker Activity was also very informative on how to use formatting and editing for a wiki. As I proceeded through the activity, I learned from the few mistakes I made in formatting so my responses were easier to read, but in the end I got the hang of it.

[Issue Tracker Activity/Three Issues]

Viewing the info on the OpenMRS Issue Tracker was also sorted out very well and made it easy to read and follow how tickets and bugs were logged. The filters make sense on how one would want to search for a particular type of issue. I was able to easily find all of the necessary field and type information, but I did have trouble at first finding the summary of the project. I was looking for a description or paragraph summary but did not realize it was right on the front page shown with data.

After perusing the list on all the tickets at a glance, I ended up choosing three according to my comfort level (programming level as well as overall knowledge of the project so far). I couldn’t think of any other ways the system might have been improved upon, but there certainly are ways. To me as an outsider to the core of the project, it seemed to suffice very well for giving someone cursory information.

[Git Videos and Tutorials]

Following the Git tutorial was very useful and gave me a tool that I can come back to in case I need to remember certain commands without having to look them up without example uses. I  completed it after about 10-15 minutes, but I still had some general confusion about what the syntax for some of the commands were (I do not feel at all comfortable operating in a Linux/Unix environment, even after my classes here at WSU). As they came up in the example terminal, I did somewhat look up what they meant but did not come up with anything really concrete as a definition or further examples of how to use them.

The Git videos were also a good reference to go alongside with while watching on my desktop and following along on my laptop. I have never used GitHub before this class (unfortunate we are learning it so late) so a further explanation with maps and diagrams was helpful. One thing I did notice though was that even though these were tutorial videos on using Git and what it is, it still was not as detailed as I would have wanted it to be for some areas.

From the blog slykrysis » cs-wsu by slykrysis and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

[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.