Thea’s Pantry helps provide food and other essentials to students, staff, and faculty in need. The pantry was established to help students who experience food insecurity, to allow them to focus on their studies and complete their education. In regards to researching more on Thea’s Pantry, it’s surprising how many different systems, components, and features are involved with the systems architecture. There are a few different systems including GuestInfoSystem, InventorySystem, ReportingSystem, IAMSystem, and EventSystem, that each have their own separate components and features that each complete their own specific tasks. I selected this for the reasoning that many individuals believe that these type of systems can be constructed and running easily and quickly. In actuality when creating these complicated systems involves lots of trial and error, testing, and lots of work to ensure every system and component is running efficiently, correctly, and used as intended.

LibreFoodPantry is a project that is being constructed primarily by instructors and their students. What is interesting about this is that not only Worcester State students are participating in this project. Students from Nassau Community College, Western New England University, and Worcester State University are all participating in this project. Anyone can work and contribute to this project, adding new features or improvements or addressing known issues within the system. A singular individual may not know how to address every problem or issue. Therefore having the capability to interact with other people working on the project and having others review work can be extremely beneficial and help anyone learn more than what they previously knew.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Conner Moniz Blog by connermoniz1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Exploring LibreFoodPantry and Thea’s Pantry

LibreFoodPantry is a community building free and open source software for food pantries. Thea’s Pantry is the food pantry provding food and other essentials to the Worcester State community,

LibreFoodPantry

When familiarizing with LibreFoodPanty, I found the Coordinating Committee page to be be the most interesting. This is because it shows the different universities that are working together to create software for food pantries. Those working with LibreFoodPantry are Nassau Community College, Western New England University, and Worcester State University. These three universities working together strengthens the Mission statement of LibreFoodPantry by being three smaller communities coming together to make one larger community who believes software can be used to help society.

Thea’s Pantry

While exploring the Thea’s Pantry Gitlab group, the architecture of the entire system is what I found to be most interesting. Thea’s Pantry uses a microservices architecture which involves breaking down the system into smaller subsystems. In the context of Thea’s Pantry, there are 5 total systems being used where two of them are from a third-party. Each subsystem is composed of features which uses components.

I found the architecture to be most interesting because we will be working on different parts of the system; therefore, understanding how the system is composed and how it functions would be helpful.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Zack's CS Blog by ztram1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For my capstone class, I needed to familiarize myself with these before working on the project.

With regard to the LibreFoodPantry docs, I think the organization structure is fairly interesting. It’s a great idea to give students a direct opportunity to engage in FOSS development in the real world and actually take part in something. It’s good for experience regardless of where students decide to go with their education. Not to mention that this is an actual piece of software being used across multiple campuses for a good cause.

We’ve spent a fair amount of time with an older version of Thea’s Pantry for one of my previous courses, but I didn’t get to really look at the actual up to date repository. It’s interesting to see all of the individual systems that combine into a full Microservice structure. With regard to the documentation, I found it fairly admirable to have a piece on inclusivity in the Computer Science space. It really is important to allow people who are interested in the space to feel welcome instead of outcasted and feeling like they don’t belong, whether by intention or not. As the documentation says, these perspectives are definitely an important addition so that software can be even better, I recall statistics that show a more diverse team tends to make a higher quality product.

From the blog CS@Worcester – V's CompSCi Blog by V and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.