My name is Nathan, and this post serves as an introduction to my Capstone blog.

Familiarizing LibreFoodPantry & Thea’s Pantry

After reviewing the LibreFoodPantry website and exploring Thea’s Pantry GitLab repositories, I gained a much clearer understanding of both the mission behind the project and the technical structure supporting it. This experience helped connect the purpose of the organization with the real-world software practices used to support it.

One aspect of LibreFoodPantry that stood out to me was its mission and values. The project is mainly focused on using free and open-source software not only to support food pantries, but also to educate students through hands-on development. I chose to focus on this because it highlights a balance that isn’t common in many academic projects, serving the community while still prioritizing student learning. Seeing values like collaboration, transparency, and long-term sustainability reflected in the project made it feel meaningful beyond just coursework.

From Thea’s Pantry, the most interesting component for me was the architecture documentation. Reading through it helped understand how the system is broken into multiple subsystems, each with a clear responsibility. I chose to write about this because it showed how large applications are intentionally designed to remain maintainable and scalable. Instead of building one massive system, the project separates concerns in a way that supports teamwork and long-term development, which aligns closely with real industry practices.

Overall, this assignment helped me see how everything we’ve learned so far comes together in a real, impactful project. I’m excited to continue developing both my technical and collaboration skills throughout this Capstone experience!!

From the blog CS@Worcester – function & form by Nathan Bui and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hi, my name is Nathan, and this blog will act as both a learning journal and a professional space where I capture my experiences and growth throughout the semester. I’ll be using it to reflect on course material, assignments, readings, and tools related to software quality and testing.

Over the semester, I’ll be diving into topics such as testing methodologies, quality assurance processes, test planning, defect management, and the importance of quality across the software development lifecycle. In addition to class content, I’ll explore external articles, blogs, and resources, and share key takeaways to deepen my understanding of how reliable, high-quality software is developed and sustained.

I’m excited to learn, experiment, and continue building my knowledge of software quality assurance and testing throughout the semester!

From the blog CS@Worcester – function & form by Nathan Bui and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

One of the things I found most interesting when exploring the LibreFoodPantry website is that it is not just a local effort; they collaborate with multiple institutions. When I was first introduced to this resource last year, I was amazed and deeply moved by the mission. It is such an incredible tool for tracking food insecurity on campus and increasing accessibility to necessities. The mission statement speaks to me because I am working towards a goal of using technology to support the mental health field. Having the opportunity to contribute to a real-world resource project like this is really exciting.

I was also impressed by how detailed the GitLab files were. Looking through the files helped me start to piece together concepts and skills I have been learning in my CS-343 (Software Construction, Design, and Architecture) course. These files provided great imagery for what working on this project in my capstone course will actually look like. Specifically, looking at the UserStories, Architecture, and Workflow files made everything feel much more tangible.

In the Architecture file, it was also interesting to see diagrams we studied in CS-343 applied to a much larger and functioning system like Thea’s Pantry. This was the first time I had looked at a WorkFlows document; however, seeing the architectural patterns transition from practice exercises to a live system is, for lack of better words, so cool! I am looking forward to seeing how our contributions will help improve this resource and better serve the community!

From the blog CS@Worcester – Vision Create Innovate by Elizabeth Baker and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello everyone this is Ben and I am making a introduction post for CS-443. During this semester I want to use this time to improve my coding skills and fundamentals so that I can use these for my skills. During the break I have been reading a couple of books and textbooks about how to improving coding skills and learning habits. For example, Make it Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDanie teaches people how to learn a new subject and maintain the knowledge. In addition, I need to build habits and consistency so that later in my career I can still learn new subjects and skills.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by Ben Santos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello everyone, my name is Ben and for this year I will be helping the Libre Food Pantry for the class. According to the website it has a mission to expand a community of students and faculty across multiple institutions who believe software can be used to help society. This mission is meant to help any school or community in order to help everyone being able to eat meals.

Moving on to the User Story map, I noticed that all walks of life from different communities struggled with this issue of not having enough food. Also in the map it showed the new features added to the system and when did the guests were able to use it. This made me think that not all the current features were added at the same time.

The reason why I choose these two subjects about the Libre Food Pantry is because being able to help a community and knowing that people are affected from it helps with wanting to do more. Open source projects like this wants as much helps as possible so that it can benefit the community as much as possible with the efforts of programmers around the world and for any community.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by Ben Santos and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

After reviewing LibreFoodPantry’s content, I found that it is not only an organization that develops and maintains humanitarian projects or supports local food pantries, but also a community where people care about their contributors and members. The content of “Code of Conduct” is a great set of guidelines to show how people should behave when it comes to working in a team or in the community. The Code of Conduct’s purpose is to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, healthy community.  However, when actions show a lack of respect and are seriously negatively affected by individuals or groups, the organizing committee will impose appropriate penalties for those actions. I found that it is really important to keep our community positive and healthy, as one of the group members, I never think not only for myself, but also for the other members. Actions, words of speech, etc., are the tools that can be harmful and should be considered before they are taken. Thus, we don’t just build tools that support our local food pantry, but also a community of LibreFoodPantry that is safe and enjoyable. 

My team was assigned to work on IAM, an access management team that allows “who” (staff, admin, or students, etc) to access “what” in the food pantry system. In the content of Thea’s Pantry, I found the UserStories.md file really helpful and straightforward. It presents the process that the staff and admin are allowed to do in the working pantry. My team is in charge of working with the login system, making sure the right person logs in to the right page. Reading the file could help us understand more about the concept and prepare for what is coming next.  

From the blog CS@Worcester – Nguyen Technique by Nguyen Vuong and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello, this semester I am taking on developing the Inventory System of Thea’s Pantry with my team and I am excited to be a part of this process! To prepare for what we will be working on, I explored the Libre Food Pantry site and the Thea’s Pantry Gitlab site.

While looking through the Libre Food Pantry site, all the FOSSisms were pretty interesting and helpful to me. I have been feeling overwhelmed with the responsibility coming into this project and creating work that people actually depend on. Reading through these words of advice/guides has calmed some of it. Two of them that stood out to me are #10 “Begin with the finishing touches” and #11 “It’s not what you know, it’s what you want to learn.” Beginning with the smallest bugs allows me to take on a low risk task, discover how the code works, and learn the bigger picture so that I can feel comfortable taking on bigger projects. Number 11 makes me realize I’m not the only one learning and that everyone else was at my knowledge level at one point. Everyone went through the learning curve, and succeeded because of perseverance and an open mind. 

The documentation of the Thea’s Pantry code was very useful for getting to know more about the process of how the software is being used. Specifically the architecture page was very insightful to how all the smaller parts make up the big picture. After reading the features section, the diagrams that we looked at in Software Construction, Design, and Architecture make a lot more sense. Now having the background knowledge that the blocks with titles like Express.js, KeyCloak, and NGINX are explaining the technology being used, it all makes a lot more sense. 

From the blog ALIDA NORDQUIST by alidanordquist and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

From the blog CS@Worcester – dipeshbhattaprofile by Dipesh Bhatta and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This somewhat serves as an introductory blogpost for me and the work I’ll be doing with the LibreFoodPantry, particularly with Thea’s Pantry in Worcester, for the upcoming semester as part of my Senior Capstone. After reading through the LFP website, something I found interesting, aside from the Pantry itself and the humanitarian goals that are intrinsic with a food pantry, was the emphasis on FOSS, and how it uses GPLv3. Something like that isn’t strictly necessary when it comes to working on a project like this, but i like the emphasis on FOSS because it goes hand in hand with the idea of humanitarian work and trying to provide for the community, whether that’s providing for the local physical community, or whether that’s providing for the open online community.

For the gitlab repository for Thea’s Pantry, something that caught my eye was the technologies page. I like the fact that there is a clear file that shows what technologies have been firmly decided on, and what technologies are under consideration. The only gripe I have with it as that it doesn’t seem to be synced up with the individual groups. In the general readme file, it states Container Orchestration: Kubernetes as “Evaluating”. I’m not really familiar with what this is, however under my specific team’s group for ReportingSystem, there is a similar readme that states Container Orchestration: Kubernetes as “Decided”. I suspect this might be related to the fact that the actual reporting system the Pantry currently uses isn’t the one in this repository as of yet, but I don’t really know.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by Justin Lam and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This is an introductory blogpost for my course in CS443 at Worcester State. I don’t have much to say yet, so this post is mainly serving as an example post/test to make sure the tagging works and there are no issues.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by Justin Lam and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.