Sensorial’Org

I’ve fallen behind in trying to keep up-to-date with where I was with my projects as assignment deadlines and interviews are brush past me. An update on the project course I’m doing:

Janruary

Week 0: Familiarized myself with Ruby and Rails. Downloaded InstantRails, and tried out a few simple applications. Of course, none of them ever works.

Week 1: Got my first application up and running! It was a proud moment.

Week 2: I downloaded the OLM codebase and struggled with getting it to communicate with Postgres. Once that was set up, I started the application and tried to get up to speed on what has already been done.

Because of the Model View Controller nature of Rails, it was difficult to follow the code in that I had to jump from one file to another in order to trace the sequence of events. The MVC model helped me understand each component of the system from a linear perspective, but when the components started to interact with each other, the relationship became harder to see; association between models is done through “Rails magic” via has_many, has_one, belongs_to, and has_many_and_belongs_to… I still have to figure out how foreign key comes into play.

To help me better understand how it was suppose to behave, I played around with application by interacting with it as an end-user. Beginning with a high level task (e.g. adding a user), I broke down each goal into a series of subtask (clicks that the user has to make in sequence to accomplish the high level task). At each step, I asked myself “What could go wrong?” and “What can I put here that might break this?” I made a note when something broke, when something behaved oddly, and anything that was ambiguous.

Week 3: At the weekly meeting, it was confirmed for me what were the bugs and what were design decisions. Since this was the week of CUSEC, I spent the days leading up to event trying to reproduce the bugs that I’ve encountered and filing tickets for them.

Week 4: The changes that I made this week were mostly for aesthetics. Synchronizing the text, realigning the page elements, establishing a visual hierarchy… I used this as an exercise to explore the Views and how they corresponded with the controllers. At the same time, I looked for ways to increase the usability, but given my lack of domain knowledge, what’s intuitive for me may not be intuitive for our stakeholders and end users.

February

Week 1: Taking a step back from the usability aspect of the project, I worked on implementing the TA and Grades model. The TA and the Student are derivations of the User; since Student was already implemented, most of the logic was there.

The Grades model includes the Assignment (the assignment that this grade is for), the Group (the group of students who submitted for this assignment; individuals will be considered as groups of one’s), the User (aka the TA who is assigned to mark this group for this assignment), and Grade (the grade that each group achieved), and Status (whether or not the TA has started marking this assignment).

This is an opportunity to work through a complete component–the controller, the model and the view. More on this later.

Week 2: Since the controllers and views of the TA and Student are almost identical, they will be refactored into a Users controller before the Code Sprint that’s taking place over later this week.