Category Archives: cs-wsu

5/5/16 Finished & Final Thoughts…

So when we first were introduced to the Radiology Module for OpenMRS  I was all excited.  We initially narrowed it down to an issue which looked to require minimal coding.  We were told that this issue might be ‘too difficult’, and we chose another issue, a simple task of deleting unused lines from a couple of files.  Simple, right?  Bang this out, move on to another issue.  Oh no….first getting OpenMRS and the Radiology module up and running, even for one of us, was crazy.  What that really taught me/us is that clear instructions are paramount.  This again was an issue because exactly what was to be done was vague via the ticket’s description.  Even after Matt asked for clarification multiple times, we weren’t entirely sure what the ‘right’ answer was.  Eventually we got an answer we took as concise enough to complete and actually finish the issue.  Unfortunately we do not know whether or not our fixes were accepted/utilized.

From the blog halfastepoff by jrichardsoniii and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

3/18/16 Chapters 4 & 5

Chapter 4  was about having the right mental state to code well.  Distractions many of us utilize on a daily basis such as music, cell phones, t.v., or when it’s late-night and/or you’re just plain tired.  While I understand his point(s), I also understand a bit about people, and how we all function differently.  Personally I find certain sounds relaxing, or in terms of being able to produce some form of work, distracting to the peripheral portions of my thoughts and allows me to concentrate only on the task at hand.  I think even if it were possible to create a ‘perfect’ environment, that the silence itself would be a distraction to me.  I also am very much NOT a morning person, and daytime is nice, but optional, I am often up, and completely conscious at 3 AM, so I feel that again, sometimes it’s more about the fit to the person, and what achieves the mental state optimal for producing excellent code.

Chapter 5 was all about that favorite recurring theme….TDD…everything should be Test Driven Development!  I know that while this concept has been shown to my classmates and myself, that it still is not a favorite for us.  I wonder if this concept shouldn’t receive its own class earlier in our curriculum sometimes considering the seeming importance placed upon it in the later courses because a lot of us seem to, and I certainly do, feel lost with this in practice, or at least more challenged than would seem necessary.  I mean I understand the idea that you can build the code around the tests, but I feel this is not necessarily perfect.  This of course could just be my limited experience and a limitation on my current model of thinking about this concept.

From the blog halfastepoff by jrichardsoniii and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

3/3/16 The ICU and You!

So I  did the Skype for class the other day…from the ICU at UMass!  I mean, how many other people can make that kind of blog post?  “Yeah, I died the other day….and still participated in a class Skype conference!”.

Chapters 2 & 3

These chapters deal with knowing when to take on more work/responsibility, and understanding when you should not.  Luckily I have some real world experience on both sides of the fence in these regards.  Mr. Martin stresses the professionalism aspects, such as assuring you will have all of the work you’ve committed to done at the time you’ve said it would be completed by.  I am well acquainted with the fact that it is often difficult to try and tell someone, especially someone who is your supervisor/boss, “No.”, or “I can’t make that happen in that timeframe.”, etc.  I think everyone should be realistic; standards exist for good reason (usually), but people are imperfect.  Understanding our own limitations often comes from testing those limitations and reassessing based on our results, and we almost always learn more when we fail.  I understand the author’s ideas on professionalism having said that though.

From the blog halfastepoff by jrichardsoniii and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

2/24/16 Open MRS and Chapter 1

 

We’re going to work on some project, or projects, in OpenMRS.  This has proven to be somewhat frustrating so far.  I’m not so sure anyone has had an easy time of it thus far, so at least I’m not alone.  I thought having things that were required already on my laptop (MySQL, Maven, Eclipse, VirtualBox, etc) would make the process more streamlined, and somehow easier, and that has not been the case.  I have downloaded OpenMRS from GitHub , which has been the only part that has seemed to have gone right so far.  Not using Eclipse and using IntelliJ has proven to be more of a challenge than I would expect.  Nothing about using IntelliJ has seemed difficult, but I can’t get it to recognize the packages…

In Chapter 1 of “The Clean Coder” by Robert Martin I mainly got the idea that professionalism is of paramount importance in the software development industry.  He reinforced other ideas developed for us in other courses; such as frequent testing and ‘cleaner’ and more versatile code.  Mr. Martin also reinforced the idea that enhancing your skills and widening your skill set(s) during your ‘off’ time will lead to better career potentials and paths, the idea of self-motivation was not lost on me. The points about/regarding professionalism seemed to be what resonated the most though.

From the blog halfastepoff by jrichardsoniii and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

1/26/16 Starting out in Software Development Capstone

Hello. I’m John, and I’m finishing up my degree, and this blog is related to our progress in our Software Development Capstone.  Despite me being considerably older than my classmates I still have the same air of excitement and concern many of them have.  It’s amazing to think that four years have just about passed, and I’m actually about to graduate.

From the blog halfastepoff by jrichardsoniii and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

And it’s over: OpenMRS Final Thoughts

This has been an exciting 15 weeks. Already, I feel ready for the real world.

On Monday, we continued work on OpenMRS RAD-235. At this point, we had not hit any roadblocks with completing the issue. Too my other teammates, I felt it seemed like an easy task. They might say otherwise compared to myself.

On our last day of class, Friday, we discussed how our Capstone class would be improved. After a good discussion, all of us were asked to complete the survey. However, once we were done, several members of our team pushed our changes in regards to the error, and as of the time I am writing this blog, we are still waiting on a pull request.

My experience with OpenMRS has been a huge help to my experience in the field of Software Development. Understanding how an open source medical program running on Linux would work intrigued me, despite the many roadblocks we hit in the process. I feel that understanding each computer’s architecture would be beneficial in determining whether the system would be capable of running a virtual machine successfully without issue, particularly one that runs on Vagrant.

Thank you to all the Computer Science professors at Worcester State for providing me the opportunity to keep pursuing my education in this field. I hope with the tools I’ve learned, I can maintain my success in the field wherever I end up.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

OpenMRS Radiology: Finished Issue

My group was working on an Issue ticket, RAD-159, where we had to delete unused code in two files. It appeared to be a simple task at first, but through a lot of confusion, we had to redo our deletions multiple times. The tickets description of what to do was not specific enough, and even after asking for help, we were still confused. This shows how important clarity of instruction is when designating work to other people. This ticket should have taken a day at the longest, but it was extended for long periods of time due to having to ask numerous questions and then having to get our group together after each answer. We did finish our issue though, and we are hopefully going to have our revisions accepted. In the future, I will know to be as thorough as possible when writing directions for other people.

From the blog cs-wsu – mmoussa7wsu by mmoussa7 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

OpenMRS: A New Issue

This week couldn’t have gotten any better. We’re already working on another issue, coded RAD-235.

On Monday, we found out that our original issue, RAD-58, was already completed by Ivo, one of the lead developers of the OpenMRS radiology module, but he forgot to mark the issue as such. As a result, Ivo granted us another error that he knows he never worked on.

We made progress on this issue since Wednesday, and there’s still more to be done with one week left. Although one of our group members couldn’t understand how the enum class in Java worked. We’ll see if he can figure it out by next week.

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Finally

Well, my first pull request was a bust. Obviously it would be since I didn’t adequately test it, but I finally got everything resolved and have my test environment set up correctly… Sourceforge seemed to be the common point of failure during my dozen or more vagrant up attempts. The dcm4chee dependencies are hosted on Sourceforge, and it consistently timed out, or errored out when trying to retrieve the zip files during the vagrant up process. I eventually got lucky on one attempt before I was going to try to vagrant scp the files onto the VM and see if I could get it working that way. I’m finally ready to test and will keep everyone updated:)

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

PAX East 2016: VR in a Software Development Environment

This year, I went to PAX East in Boston. At least one exhibit I saw on the show floor contained at least one VR (virtual reality) device to try. During the event, I had the chance to try the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive.

On Friday, the first VR project I got to see was an Oculus Rift story told by a WPI graduate. “The Piper” tells the ancient story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in a first-person perspective. Although the sequence through the Oculus Rift headset was accurate, I found some bugs. For example, several of the virtual children kept passing through me as if I wasn’t there. This was something I could expect from an early use of VR.

I never got the chance to try any VR related projects on Saturday, as I was focused on other independent video games. Although on Sunday, another opportunity to try VR arose with another project from an independent Chicago-based developer. Titled “We Are Chicago”, the game tells the true story of a family the southside of Chicago, historically a part of the city where most gang violence has happened. In the demo, the family, the subject of the game, goes through their normal evening routine when gunshots are heard. It is then the player’s choice to take the story in their own direction. The booth displayed an HTC Vive setup, allowing the player to control the character using the headset and the two handheld motion controllers. During a brief interview with Lead Designer Cindy Miller, she told me that the game was not meant for VR and “because you’re in a Virtual Reality setting, you are expected to have unexpected things happen, like going through a table or a counter.” This had happened to me many times in my experience with the demo, though they didn’t give me any problems as I was able to fix my position easily with a combination of moving myself and the use of the motion controllers.

After the event, I looked back at a panel that was in progress while I tried We Are Chicago. The panel, “The Cutting Edge of PC Gaming with Newegg,” centered around the future of VR as well as the relationship between hardware and competitive gamers, a concept collectively known as eSports. The entire panel focused on a hardware developer’s perspective on how VR is affecting the consumer base. Several key points were made about VR, including its impact and whether it was here to stay. When asked about impact, and using education as an example, Robert Hallock, Head of Global Technical Marketing at AMD, stated that VR “redefines the way [anyone] can sense and understand learning,” supporting his case with examples such as the ride of Paul Revere and a child’s perspective of a blue whale swimming over their head.

In my perspective, I think VR has a place in the software development environment for many reasons. One of them is the many opportunities it brings, such as the point about education that Hallock described in the panel. In the same panel, when asked whether VR was here to stay, Hallock stated “versus 3DTV…everyone [he] talked to has tried or wants to try VR.” Chris Pate, Senior Product Manager at Logitech, described the evolution of VR before Hallock, stating, “as [VR] becomes more immersive [and] more compelling…that’s where it drives the interest…of the technology and…the accessibility and affordability of it is a large part of it.” These statements have helped me push my stance towards the inclusion of VR in the software development field, and, taking in a quote from Chris Geiser, Head of US SSD Sales at Samsung, I “certainly think that [VR] is a technology that is here to stay.”

You may watch a recording of the hour-long panel on VR here:
https://www.twitch.tv/pax3/v/62558539

From the blog cs-wsu – jdongamer by jd22292 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.