Open Source Works Because of Awesome People

It's just not right to start off this week's blog post with anything else but a thank-you to Daniel Diniz (ajaksu IIUC) for his help getting the survey feature ready for midterm evaluations. Preparing surveys has been more difficult then I predicted, and his help has been indispensable.

When first asked about how long it would take to get surveys ready, I gave 'a week' as a ballpark figure. I was initially only thinking about the problem on the level of creating and saving HTML form fields.

And grading didn't seem that it would be too difficult. Just make a Boolean property, right?

I wasn't considering the various complexities involved. For example, if a mentor is mentoring several students, and surveys were given that asked that the mentor filled it out for each student, it is no longer simply a matter of loading some saved HTML.

There should be a very simple method to pair the results of the survey taken by a student and the survey taken by the student's mentor, as well as distinguish between x number of evaluation surveys, and properly pair groups of saved survey records.

Anyways, this is where ajaksu comes in. He's helped to keep momentum in survey development, and since GSOC started we've been pinging and relaying new work just as the other gets distracted or exhausted. The result is a survey feature that should perform admirably this summer.


The last week and all of the collaboration involved also been a good lesson about better living through version control. Which reminds me to link to our repositories:

http://github.com/ajaksu/Melange

http://github.com/jamslevy/Melange

You can keep track of the progress as ajaksu and I are preparing to merge surveys into production.

There's also the Github issue tracker:

http://github.com/jamslevy/Melange/issues

I'd like to take the initiative in a "dry run" for surveys, before the midterm opening. While a lot of development effort has been going towards the midterm component, it's also important that non-evaluation surveys can also be successfully administered.

In this next week, I plan to do a code review for the news feed code and finish all the outstanding tickets for both surveys and news feeds.