Category Archives: WSU CS

CS 401 Introduction

I am a senior in the computer science major here at WSU and I am very excited to be taking CS 401. I know that professional software development requires collaborating as a team, so I am glad to be taking a class that will expose me to that environment. In addition to becoming familiar with a team environment, I hope to accomplish the following in this course:

  • Put my skills to the test: I feel that I have a lot of programming knowledge at this point but I have never worked on anything but “toy” programs. To actually be able to contribute to a real project would be very rewarding to me.
  • Expand my resume: I sincerely hope we are able to make a meaningful contribution to some open-source project. Being able to claim that on a resume couldn’t hurt when looking I’m looking for my first programming job.
  • Learn more about open source: As a CS major, I embarrassingly know very little about the open-source community. I hope that this class will open my eyes a bit to the open source world and possibly get me active in the community.
  • Blogging: I rarely look at blogs. I know very little about them, but I’m trying to change that. Setting up this blog and learning about tags and feeds was an adventure for me. I hope that as I blog for this class I will become more interesting in blogging in general. I know that blogs can be a huge source of news and information now, especially in the tech industry.

I am in group 3 and do not know my teammates very well yet. I know that will change soon. I hope we all have a great semester!

From the blog Code Your Enthusiasm » WSU CS by Jon and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

So it begins..

Hey everyone,

I’ve really been looking forward to this class for some time.  As the last CS course I need to take before graduating in the spring, I’m hoping that I will learn as much as possible from it.

Obviously one of my goals is to learn some stuff and get a good grade, but I’m expecting much more from this course. Working in a group environment is something that is very common in the “real world,” and being able to get some experience working on an open source project in a group should set us off on the right foot in regards to succeeding after college. Another goal of mine, not only for this course but for the semester, is to improve my coding skills. It has been over a semester since my last programming assignment and I’m in need of some brushing up.

On that note, I think this course is going to be much different than any other CS course I have taken up until now, but it seems like its going to be fun and very interesting.

From the blog clacroix12 by clacroix12 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello, World/CS 401!

This is my first post on this shiny new blog for CS-401!

I have been excited for this course for quite some time. I am a very big (and vocal) advocate of FOSS, but I have had very little experience actually participating in FOSS projects (aside from a couple of bug reports). I have found trying to get into a pre-existing project to be quite daunting. A few months back I took a look at the xbmc source code because I wanted to implement a feature but I did not have the time nor the patience to sift through the massive amount of code. My course goal will be to actually overcome this hurdle and offer serious contributions to a FOSS project.

I’m not much of a blogger. I’m one of those people that make a few posts and then completely stop and abandon the blog. Since blogging is a course requirement, I will be forced to be a good blogger, at least for a few months.

I am looking forward to putting all of my collective software development knowledge to use. I already know how to use version control systems, mainly git, but I am excited that is finally being formally taught in a course. I already use IRC but I’m glad that the entire class will become aquainted with its glory. I have some experience with editing Wikis because I occassionally write documentation at work. Planets are a new-ish term for me. I recognized the term but did not know that they were an aggregation of community blog posts.

Working in groups is not something I usually do. I’m more of the “lone wolf” character, but a cooperative group will accomplish much more than a single person. That said, I will try my best to work effectively in a group. I worked with a team of two others to make Nonagon last year and that worked out very well.

I am pleased with the “Teaching Open Source” book so far. It did a very good job of covering the basics of what open source is and why programmers like us should care about it. I found a few small typos that I should probably submit corrections for at some point.

From the blog Dave Thompson » WSU CS by davexunit and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS 401

As this is my first post, I will try to be pithy.  Having read the first three chapters of Teaching open source, I find myself intrigued by the idea of contributing to an open source project.  I am familiar, in a somewhat shallow sense, with many of the tools used in an open source community (such as bugtrackers, version-control software, IRC, wikis and blogs), I look forward to learning more about them and how they add value to such projects.

I hope to, by the completion of CS 401, have a better grasp of the open source community and plan to continue, as I am able, to contibute.

As a non-pithy sidenote, I am a gamer who enjoys the use of add-on programs to enhance my experience.  Many of these add-ons are open source with dedicated communities surrounding them.  I imagine that exposure to these communities over the last few years will come in handy.

From the blog sflynn1976 » wsu-cs by sflynn1976 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello CS 401

Hi everybody,

I am happy to take this course because I think that I will learn a lot from it. My objectives for this course are a lot for example; to learn how to work on teams, how to get involved with different projects from FOSS by contributing on them and learning from them. In addition, this experience is very important for me because for the first time I will have the opportunity to work on real world projects.

From the blog Eduart Lekdushi CS401 by elekdushi and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

CS401 First Post

I am excited to work on a big open source project. I have never had an experience working with a project with more than 25 classes before, so I think this will be a good experience. I have worked with git on a very basic level, but never anything with merging content with others, so I am also looking forward to learning how more advanced git operations are performed/how they work. By then end of the semester I hope to have accomplished learning all about git/revision control systems, and have a good amount of experience with large scale debugging tools.

I think it will be interesting working with a group for a whole semester, and will give the feel of how software production departments run (on a smaller scale possibly).

From the blog nathandoe » WSU CS by nathandoe and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Object Oriented Design

As the capstone to my final semester at WSU I am enrolled in an Object Oriented Design class. I have very much been looking forward to taking this class as I expect to learn quite a bit as well as cementing my programming skills.

I think what I’m most looking forward to is becoming intimately familiar with VCS. I’ve messed around a little with git but overall I’m a complete beginner with VCS. As such, one of my goals for the course is to be proficient with whichever VCS we end up using for our project.

Another goal that I have for this course is to ensure that I’m ready for “the real world”. Throughout my college career I’ve been concerned that I won’t be able to make in an actual job and I think this course will help me to build my confidence that I’m prepared for my first real job.

I really hope that over the course of this semester I am able to contribute to whatever open source software project we choose to work on. It would be great to have my name on an OSS project and it would certainly help bolster my resume.

From the blog The Mind of Mattamizer » WSU CS by mattamizer and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Some thoughts and expectations of CS 401

My first thought about this course is that this seems like a good class where I will be able to put what I had learned in other courses to use. By working on an actual OSS throughout this class, I hope that I would get more comfortable coding, designing a software, and working together with other people in a large group.

From the blog longnguyen16 » wsu-cs by watever10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Obj Oriented Design/Analysis: Goals

My goal during this course is to learn about how software engineering and development works in real world company environments. I’d like to learn the various aspects of working in a team environment on a large open source software package. I’d also like to become familiar with the various terms and scenarios a software engineer/developer in the real world environment is faced with on a daily basis. I hope to become a better programmer and team player through the course of this course.

From the blog nzahid » WSU CS by nzahid and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

WSU CS Object Oriented Design First Post!

Hello,

I am really looking forward to starting this course and actually contributing to a large scale, open source project. I don’t really have a preference about which project we end up contributing to, whether it is Firefox, Sage, or anything else. I am mostly just excited to look at real world code and hopefully make some useful and interesting changes to the code.

I am hoping to get several things out of this course. First of all, I would really like to contribute something worthwhile to an open source project. I want to be able to look back at these projects and see that I actually made a difference, even if it is not huge.

Secondly, I would like to be able to apply some of the things I have learned in previous CS courses to these projects. We learned so many useful techniques of Software Development in our 375 class (Software Analysis and Design), that I would really enjoy seeing it all in action. Things like Design Patterns, Polymorphism, etc. are very important factors in elegant software design and though I have used all of these techniques in real world code at my internships, I would like to have a chance to implement them all in my own way for one of these projects.

Finally, I am looking forward to using GIT more on my own. Again, I am familiar with GIT from my internships, yet there is plenty more I would like to learn about it. I know it is an incredibly powerful tool and I can’t wait to get started with really putting its features to use.

Overall, I think this is going to be a great course and I think we are going to learn a lot.

From the blog trevorhodde by Trevor and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.