First Day

What was supposed to be the second day of school ended up being the first (by some miracle -- I really needed that extra day).  Software Engineering Practicum was the perfect start to the new semester.  It turns out that I'm the new kid in this class, since I had Boetje for CSCI 362 the year before.  Seems that everyone else is already very familiar with working with each other, but the CS department is small enough that I already know most of the people here.

I'm very satisfied with the group that I'm in.  Alex and I already know each other from work, and I met Megan last semester in a previous class.  While Austin is the newest person to me, I know we've had classes together before.

We managed to decide on roles for our group pretty quickly.  Alex is the group leader, Megan is the spokesperson, Austin is the writer, and I'm the chief programmer/liaison.  My role consists of two major things:

1) Observing all the code checked in by each team member, making sure that each contributor's work compiles, and that the code maintains a consistent and readable format.

2) When communicating with the Open Source community, I'll be the one in charge of maintaing our code, communicating with other developers (in IRC chat, etc.), and making sure any work that we publish to the Open Source project is the best it can be.

While the roles worked out well for everyone, we did take quite a bit longer to come up with a name for our group. After roughly 10 minutes of googling a name, we finally decided on The Flux Capacitors. Can't go wrong with a Back to the Future reference I suppose.

All-in-all, day one of this class turned out great, and I'm excited to see where this semester is going to take the team and myself.

As for the readings, I agree with what is said in the first chapter.  Creating your own "Senior Project" for programming isn't really the best practice for the field of Computer Science.  Being thrown into a real programming project is not only more meaningful (since there will most likely be users that will actually use the program), but it provides students a way to understand the entire process of development -- by throwing students into a much larger task, much like one that would be seen from a future employer.

Conformation for POSSCON: Transaction ID: RKCHWVVPPL, Order Number: 10000247