When the bell rings..class is over!!!

Three things I want to get off my head.

1.If you are a Computer Science Major at UHM, take ICS 413.

2.If you are a EE major with a focus on computers at UHM, take ICS 413.

3.If you are a MIS major who is leaning towards the technical side at UHM, take ICS413.


Ok, so with that being said. I had a great time in the class watching other students tackle their development issues and try to learn how to schedule themselves to get things done. Being a little older and a non traditional student coming back to school after working a few years in Systems Administration/Engineering in some fast pace enviroments, I came adjusted for the "pop a new technology in your face and you need to know how to use it since yesterday mentality". However, I learned a lot more then I expected during this course about how to better design systems and work with others in a more directly integrated enviroment. I liked how the class was designed where we watched web cast of the class at home and did coding during the class. This lead to those initial "huh!?!" problems that are frequent in the IT world being solved by the professor or other students immediately. I definitely enjoyed working with different people on different topics during the class as I got a direct chance to see how they think through coding issues and not just the product. This helped me to find more propectives to include in my thought process enabling me to be able to pose options to issues that my team faced that were not only my primary way of doing it, but also a way I saw somebody else tackle a similar style issue.

Ok ok...I realize I am rambling on with a thought dump right now, but no better time then to let it out at the end, I figured.

So at the end I applaud all the students who gave their all during this course to become better Software Engineers and I am thankful for the opportunity to learn from everyone.

Saving everybody some Green$: GreenOMeter 2.0

During the last month or so, we (the same team as previously mentioned in my post for GreenOMeter v1.0) have been working on this application GreenOMeter. With the specifications, we started to implement functions for the 2.0 version of GreenOMeter. This time around, I feel that we were much more organized in the distribution of tasks. For the final end result of GreenOMeter v2.0, we have seperated the stop light and the grid onto two different pages, adding three more pages about the functionalities of the application and our contact information.

I have to say this time around was a very interesting experience and as this was my first time thinking in the mindset of a software engineer versus that of a programmer I see a clear in distinct difference in what outcomes the they produce. We initially thought "Hey! Let's add in every feature possible!" and I was definitely mental pushing towards that direction, ok so yea I did implement some wasted code like facebook integration to allow users to post the current chart or green days to their facebook accounts. Ultimately I applied the rules of Software Engineering I learned through the course and decided to drop it until we first determined completely how to implement all required functionality and start on that. Once we felt safe in our progress in that area we could proceed to add bells and whistles.

I had a lot of fun and I am very thankful to my group for coming together to tackle task. We developed a technique of switching task as we learned more about ourselves and each other to allow for the best possible outcome. We didn't go for a hey, let that guy do all the coding or documentation method. We even stapled off the only let the guy who seems the best at programming handle the hardest task. What we did was give everybody a decent range of task to in each area and if they got stuck another group member or the whole team would converge on the issue to solve it.

At the end of it all, we had a fully functional application that presented with a good and well thought through user interface.

Using the User Guide page on our Google Code project hosting website, you can take a look at our project.