Reflections on my Progress

Team Obsidian is confirmed for having a booth at POSSCON. The team sat down tonight to discuss the work we need to finish. The tutorials on the Wiki as well as some small changes to the code still need to be made, but everyone on the team seems to be getting better acquainted with the code-base. So now that we know we have a booth we need to determine what our plan is for the table. Everyone agreed that a demo would be cool, that way we can show that this isn't just a planned project but one that is actually in a workable form so the theory of Stone Soup can be applied (Stone Soup being the idea that if you have a workable base other people are more interested in helping/giving). So we are planning on finding other open source Java projects to run Obsidian on during our time at the table. Another idea is to have another "floating" computer for people to type in their information so we can email them about the project later down the line to remind them to check it out. We have the stickers that we designed for the project, and they look amazing, so we will also be giving away stickers to people who come up to the table.

The documentation that I chose to work on consisted of "How to Contribute" and "How to Run". Contributing was harder then the how to run in my opinion. Coming up with the rules and norms of how to submit a patch as well as standard coding practices we used was a little difficult. I emulated some of the bigger open source projects while trying to keep in mind that we are a smaller project, so automated scripts and automated testing are a little bit of overkill. During the meeting we discussed how people can claim bugs, and our preferred way of submitting the solutions. Another thing that is currently in the contributing page is how to get and build from source. I put it here originally because contributors will need to be able to get the source, but after running a few tests with our fellow students a lot of them went to the "How to Run" page to build from source. I'm planning on talking to the group about this to either make a separate page for source code building, or linking the "How to Run" page to the section in contributing.

Everyone is busy working on their bugs and documentation, but lots of us have been feeling a strain with the semester coming into full swing. I know personally I need to work on other classes a little more, so before I go to POSSCON I'll be sitting down and working on all the homework for the next week so I don't have to worry while I'm at POSSCON.