Academic Technology Group Developers Blog

The Code Kata

September 8, 2014 — JaZahn

The idea of code kata is not a new one. This has been floating around for a while, but I didn’t make the connection of its importance until recently.

The idea is this: doing your work is not the same as practicing what you do. The analogy I like the most is the chess analogy. A grand master cannot be a grand master by simply playing in tournaments. In fact, just playing in tournaments would make a pretty poor player. Studying tactics, reading, discussing (with other human beings that have their own unique perspectives) outside of the game allows personal growth and an understanding of the game that is unattainable by simply playing it.

Maybe that analogy speaks to me because I understand games and being great at them vs just playing them.

I spent some time misunderstanding what a code kata needed to be. For the longest time I had understood it to be technical growth via solving algorithms or learning new technologies. These could be katas, but what makes katas doable is 2 things.

Simple.
Interesting.

Keeping them simple allows you to be able to make time for them. Google the FizzBuzz test. Even something that simple can keep your mind thinking like a developer.

Keeping them interesting allows for you to care about them. And caring about them will ensure they actually get done. If you’re not interested in learning node but you set yourself up to learn it as your kata. One, that’s a big task, but more importantly, if you’re not interested, you’re setting yourself up to fail. This is a great way to find what it is you’re interested in and focus more.

Myself, I seem to currently be interested in best practices and the social aspects of software engineering. So I’ve decided to increase the blog posts I do. From the beginning of these, I’ve been focused on doing at least one a month. And that’s been a way for me to think through some of things I’ve worked on in the last few years. By writing them out, it’s been a rear way for me to cement the things I’ve been doing in my head and analyze them a little more carefully. This, I believe, will help me be better at my job.

Yes, I blog for me, not for any kind of readership. That’s helpful since no one reads these 🙂

Posted in Uncategorized. 1 Comment »

Big on Big Data

September 5, 2014 — Michael D. Hilborn

Of major interest in Educational Technology is Big Data, which is a rather all-encompassing term for the vast mountains of information that our computers are collecting and how we humans might take advantage of it. The 2014 NMC Horizon Report for Higher Education highlighted this interest, noting that the “Rise of Data-Driven Learning and Assessment” and “Learning Analytics”, both of which revolve around the anlysis of Big Data, are technological trends that may have profound impact on education as we know it. A primary goal of several MOOCs, including edX, HarvardX, and MITx, is to research the data they collect from thousands of world-wide participants. And here, at Harvard, a main objective of the new Teaching and Learning Technologies program is to research all the data our new Learning Management System and associated tools will provide. Finally, our own little group, the Academic Techngology Development team, is starting to research how we can best analyze the data our tools collect.

The main drive behind this interest in Big Data–at least, in Educational Technology–is the belief that through analyzing all of this information, we can create a better teaching and learning experience for instructors and students. The idea goes something like this: Alice, a student at Wonderland University, takes a course on existentialism from the Caterpillar. As Alice completes her assessments, the results are stored online, and through careful analysis of these results, the Caterpillar is able to deduce which concepts Alice is having difficulty understanding, and in which conecpts she is excelling. The Caterpillar can then tailor Alice’s future work to her needs, thus creating a better learning experience for her.

That’s the simplified version of the tale; many other permutations exist. For example, the Caterpillar may recognize that another student, Tweedledee, excels in one area that his brother, Tweedledum, does not, and decides to pair the two up so that Tweedledee can help his sibling. Or, perhaps, the Caterpillar discovers that his students grasp the concepts of mushrooms better when he discusses the concepts of fungi first, and adjusts his future syllabi accordingly.

Regardless of the scenarios, the promises of Big Data rely on the firm belief that something meaningful exists somewhere in all of that information, and that if we extract that meaningful something, then we can do something meaningful with it. Sound a bit ethereal? It’s not, as commercial companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Google have uncannily demonstrated with their search and recommendation enginees. And in regards to applying Big Data to education, there’s a large field of research going on, not to mention a growing field of application and practice.

Posted in Big Data. Tags: big data, learning analytics, mooc. 2 Comments »

Grow Developers

August 31, 2014 — JaZahn

At OSCON, I attended a lot of great sessions. One that had an impressive impact on me was Grow Developers. It was not what I expected. I only read half the description and it seemed like it was right up my alley of “developing developers”. That is, helping developers get better.

However, as soon as the talk started, I was shocked to discover it was actually a women in technology talk. At first I was disappointed, then I looked for the door and realized I sat in the front and would have to walk through a room full of women… That would be awkward. So I got comfortable and braced myself for a talk I didn’t think I wanted to hear. I mean, yes, there’s not enough women in technology, that sucks. It’s probably unfair because of cultural perceptions, but I was at OSCON to learn about technology and awesomenesses and such, not gender equality.

But it wasn’t so bad. In fact, the things covered in the talk were not altogether gender equality specific, and could be abstracted into exactly what I wanted to hear about in the first place.

Better Job Descriptions

One super important point that was made was that job descriptions need to be better. Too often jobs are posted, and people are clearly qualified. Their resumes perfectly match the job description, but they never get a call back. This often happens because what people are looking for specifically isn’t included in the job description. But the fact that someone is weeded out when they appear to be a perfect fit on paper tends to lead them to believe there is something else keeping them from the job. Personally, culturally. Solution to this is better job descriptions and better communication from HR. This is something I’ve felt 100 times over.

Stop Interrogations

Ever been on an interview where you had to justify yourself or answer absurd CS questions to a room full of people? This is bad enough as a guy justifying himself to 3-10 other guys, it’s a lot worse when it’s a woman who has to justify herself to a room full of guys. Something that we’ve all had to endure in this profession. It’s like right off the bat, being disrespected. By respecting people, wanting them to come in and impress, a step towards that is to make them feel comfortable. Make them feel like you want them to succeed.

Brogrammers

I wasn’t familiar with this word until the show Silicon Valley. Since then, I thought it was a joke of a word. Representing a culture that didn’t really exist. Like the frat-guy programmer. But apparently I misunderstood? It’s more about the way men communicate. We are sometimes hostile to each other. An example can be made of code reviews, it might be common for a lot of people to say “your code sucks, wtf”. In fact that reminds me of a code quality comic courtesy of Jeff Atwood. This is not really a welcoming culture for anyone. Without an “in” attitude, people (not just women) aren’t going to feel welcome, and it’s going to distance people who aren’t already in this culture.

Solvable Problems

These are solvable problems with our culture. Work with HR, don’t gang up on people, be a little more sensitive to other people. Be better.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: brogrammers, interviews, job descriptions, OSCON, resumes. Comments Off »

Integrating Jasmine with Travis CI

July 31, 2014 — abarrett

One of the things I’ve been wanting to automate with our Harmony Lab project is the javascript test suite so that it runs via Travis CI. I tried once before, but hit a wall and abandoned the effort. I recently had the opportunity to work on this as part of a professional development day in ATG, which is an excellent practice that I think all departments should embrace, but that’s a topic for another day. If you’re not familiar with Travis, it’s a free continuous integration service that provides hooks for github so that whenever you push to a branch, it can run some tests and return pass/fail (among other things). Getting this to work with a suite of python unit tests is easy enough according to the docs, but incorporating javascript tests is less straightforward.

Harmony Lab JS tests use the Jasmine testing framework and all of the unit tests are created as RequireJS modules. This is nice because each unit test, which I’ll call a spec file, independently defines the dependencies it needs and then loads them asynchronously (if you’re not using RequireJS, I highly recommend it!). Running the Harmony Lab tests locally is a simple matter of pointing your browser to http://localhost:8000/jasmine. This makes a request to Django which traverses the spec directory on the file system and finds all spec files, and then returns a response that executes all of the specs and reports the results via jasmine’s HTMl reporter. But for headless testing, we don’t want to be running a django server unless it’s absolutely necessary. It would be nice if we could just execute some javascript in a static html page.

It turns out, we can! The result of integrating jasmine with phantomjs and travis CI is Harmony Lab Pull Request #39. You can check out the PR for all the nitty-gritty details. The main stumbling block was getting requirejs to play nicely with phantomjs and getting the specs to load properly. The phantomjs javascript code, that is, the javascript that controls the browser, was the simplest part since it only needed to listen for the final pass/fail message from jasmine via console.log and then propagate that to travis.

Posted in Continuous Integration, Harmony Lab, Javascript. Comments Off »

Basic LTI Tutorial Using PHP

July 11, 2014 — Michael D. Hilborn

Introduction

This tutorial will get you up and running with a development environment, complete with a virtual machine running an Apache 2 server with PHP, a basic LTI library written in PHP, and a simple basic LTI-compliant LMS. By the end of the tutorial, you will have written a simple “Hello, World!” LTI tool, and you will be ready to delve into the world of LTI coding. Please note that we assume you already have the following knowledge:

An understanding of directories and files, and how to navigate through them using a terminal window on your operating system;
How to install software packages on your operating system;
An understanding of fundamental web concepts, such as HTML, CSS, HTTP requests, POST requests, etc.
Some experience in setting up web servers;
Basic knowledge of PHP;
An understanding of basic LTI concepts and, in particular, the Basic LTI (v1.0) specifications.

Ready to begin? No? Then grab some coffee or another refreshing beverage. We’ll wait. . .

Ready now? We hope so! Because we’re getting started.

(more…)

Posted in LTI. Comments Off »

PeopleSoft and Star Trek

July 6, 2014 — JaZahn

When I first encountered peoplesoft, I was woefully underwhelmed. Like something a newbie PHP person would have written 10 years prior. In fact, I’ve worked with dozens of similarly functioning sites over the years, so it honestly wasn’t a big deal.

I think I first noticed it was a big deal when I got an email about a year ago from HR, saying they’d give bonuses to people who referred Java and PeopleSoft professionals. That got me to thinking PeopleSoft and Java developers were roughly equivalent. I noticed the positions for them were being posted at roughly the same grade. I didn’t think much of it beyond that.

Recently I figured out what PeopleSoft development actually is. It’s not coding at all. It’s configuration management. Not too far removed from someone who can work in Drupal. I was floored. Not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because such a focus was being put on configuration over custom. I find this both refreshing and scary.

I woke up the other night and couldn’t get back to sleep thinking about this. Was this the future of web development? Configuration management? Was web development eventually going to become 90% “PeopleSoft”? I’ve even been thinking it made sense because Welsey Crusher — while gifted — was not the kind of person I saw coding the woman in red in C. That would require a team of developers. Sure, maybe there’s some awesome libs in the future, but more likely programming in the future will be tantamount to drag and drop. I mean, think about how they controlled the Holodeck, they were giving basic commands, parameters and values. Voice activated PeopleSoft.

Eventually hardware will get better and better, and the bloat of PeopleSoft and like platforms will be less of an inhibitor.

Eventually is a ways away though. Today, speed is paramount. Users demand immediate gratification, and that requires optimization. And PeopleSoft can’t meet user expectations in that way. So it just remains a corporate institution. Something people will put up with because that’s what’s been sold to them.

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: configuration management, future, innovation, optimization, PeopleSoft, Star Trek. 1 Comment »

Gamifying Work

June 27, 2014 — Michael D. Hilborn

My character, currently attired as a pirate, standing next to his pet, a flying pig.

I’ve always wondered how one might go about gamifying the workplace, and quite by accident, I discovered a way how. Although not specifically designed for work, HabitRPG is a “free habit building app that treats your life like a game,” and I and a colleague have started using it to gamify part of our work-life.

If you are like me, there’s plenty of things to do at work, so many things that it’s very easy to lose track of what one needs to do, so I take advantage of to-do lists. Every day, I create a to-do list of work that needs to be completed that day, even if it’s a simple thing, such as getting onto my Instant Messenger account or checking my calendar (seriously, as sad as it seems, if I didn’t remind myself to do these things, I wouldn’t do them). And if an item doesn’t get done, it gets pushed to the next day.

HabitRPG transforms to-do lists, as well as your overall habits, into a simple fantasy role-playing game (RPG). Like most of the RPGs in the fantasy genre, you undertake a persona called a “character” who starts out as a lowly adventurer. By completing quests, you gain experience, gold, and other treasures that help your character slowly build him/herself into a hero.

Quests in HabitRPG take on the form of individual habits (such as “isolating oneself for 1hr to get something done”) or individual items on to-do lists. When you complete a habit or an item on a to-do list, you are rewarded with experience, gold, and, if you’re lucky, you might find a piece of treasure you can use later in the game. The more you complete your tasks, the more powerful your character becomes.

And, as in any RPG, your character is in constant peril. Uncompleted tasks deal out damage, and if your character receives too much damage, your character will die. Never fear, your character will be resurrected, but there will be penalties, such as a loss of experience and treasure. This mechanic forces you to stay on top of your to-do lists, for if you let them go, you’ll pay the price.

I’ve started using HabitRPG for all of my to-do lists, including the one I use at work. I won’t claim an increase in productivity or anything like that, but the game does make keeping track of my worklife much more enjoyable than it used to be (and I get rewarded if I do something I normally procrastinate on, such as writing a blog post). Also, there are ways to team up with other players, such as your co-workers, which might make the workplace an even more congenial place, but we haven’t tried those aspects of the game yet.

The rules and mechanics to HabitRPG go much deeper than I have described–tasks can have different difficulty levels, you can collect and feed pets, you cast spells. . . just to name a few of the complexities of the game. But, overall, HabitRPG operates on a simple premise: For every task in life you complete, you and your character become hardier and stronger.

Posted in Gamification. Tags: Gamification, habitrpg. 1 Comment »

Scrum vs Kanban

June 16, 2014 — JaZahn

I wanted to learn about Kanban — as I wanted to see what the “alternative” to scrum was. What I found pretty quickly was that they are not equivalent systems.

One big thing I found was that Kanban isn’t a replacement for scrum. It’s actually a very small change management procedure that is supposed to be introduced to an existing process as an added layer, which can be used to help make incremental improvements.

Kanban is super simple. All it is, at its core, is custom workflow steps with limits on how many items can be in each step. It’s a visual way to keep track of where your “stories” are in process and limits to keep too many things from being “in process” or “in testing” at one time. In that way, it’s supposed to help you keep on target, with minimal context switching.

Pro-Kanbaneers state the weaknesses of scrum are

Unclear development steps
Context switching
Partially done work

I’m not convinced “unclear development steps” is a real thing, because they’re mostly saying scrum is confined to 3 or 4 workflow steps (“on deck”, “in process”, “testing”(sometimes), and “done”). I’m pretty sure in scrum you’re “allowed” to have custom workflows, where the development steps become more clear. But there is a real problem that comes up with being bottlenecked in the sprint and having to carry stories over to the next sprint. And context switching is always a problem, but not really avoidable…

There is a perception of scrum that it’s very rigid. I’ve never felt that way, but then, it’s not like a read any books on scrum. I’ve always through it was adaptive — because doesn’t it have to be?

We deal with partially done work by either breaking stories out into smaller stories or breaking out tasks and making sure the tasks that are done are complete and the hours recorded (so that our hour burndown is useful). But maybe my perception of scrum is wrong.

Though the more I read and listen to about agile, the more I feel people are missing the point. They say the word “agile”, but the word loses its meaning if you’re not agile… The whole reason agile exists is to make processes more adaptable, to make people more amenable to change. It’s all about constantly changing and adapting to what is needed.

References:

Kanban vs. Scrum: Kanban is NOT for Software Development, but Scrum is!

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/kanbandev/conversations/topics/9260

Posted in Uncategorized. 2 Comments »

Accessibility and Mobility and Web Development

May 31, 2014 — JaZahn

Mobility and Accessibility are not new technologies that have come up. They are not extras that some of us need to tack on to what web developers do.

They are an essential part of web development and should be considered as basic skills.

Accessibility is not hard. It used to be, it really used to be, but with HTML5, it’s actually quite simple. Simply a small part of the HTML5 spec, something web developers should know. Mobility was a hot new topic 6+ years ago. Now it’s expected that the applications you build are in some way available on a mobile platform.

It is an expectation.

Why is this not the reality? Why are web developers still making applications the same way they were 10 years ago? It partly has to do with web development being a “full stack” profession for so long. Traditionally, the front end has been small and the back end has been “the application”. The direction of the web is putting more of the application on the front end, so developers that are considered full stack have to now know more than basic HTML and the minimal JavaScript it takes to do some validation. JavaScript has become huge, for large applications, it requires its own framework.

I don’t think that’s been adequately realized by the web development community yet. The future of the web is a partnership, where the applications are separate. the back end an API, the front end the “actual application” that gets the data it needs from the API. As such, people are turning more to micro frameworks for the back end, and away from what had become the staple Rails clones — and much further away from the even larger, more complex frameworks.

I’m not sure if Single Page Applications are truly “the” future. But they are the now. It is important to stay on top of this, as this industry is constantly changing. But one thing is for sure, if you’re a business fully invested in back end developers, you’re hitting a problem where you feel like you need to hire “UI specialists” when you really need either 1) for back end developers to beef up their front end development skills or 2) to hire developers focused on front end “development” (as opposed to graphic designers).

Posted in Uncategorized. Tags: accessibility, Javascript, mobile, mobility. Comments Off »

Mobility Workshop

April 27, 2014 — JaZahn

gold stick figures sitting together working on their gold laptops A couple of months ago, we had a very successful presentation on vagrant/puppet. Given by a developer, it sparked motivation in some devops enthusiasts to give a workshop. It went really well. (Vagrant Tutorial)

They had a great format with their workshops that seemed effective. They were super enthusiastic, which translated to super prepared. They had created a wordpress post that was a very detailed, step by step instruction on getting started.

The interest and effectiveness of this sparked motivation to do “other topics”. So I put together this tutorial on mobile development, “featuring jQuery Mobile”.

I thought the idea of something where I had the material prepared beforehand and could just say “go” was a great place to start. This shouldn’t be a presentation, it should be an opportunity for people to get their hands dirty.

I was running through tutorials and found a lot of them had put their code on github. At some point I had the idea to use branches to “step” through the tutorial. The way I envisioned the workshop going was to start with nothing, and build out a mobile app through logical steps — as a lot of tutorials do. Do a header, do a menu, do a list, do a link, do a transition, do a search. Coming up with a list of “things to do” was easy.

Putting it together with github also meant I could just put the directions in the base readme and it would be a completely self-contained tutorial. (Not to mention, having it in git allowed me to force people who I know don’t want to make the switch out of SVN to use a VCS that is so much nicer.)

Anyway, the finished draft took a long time. It was a lot of easy stuff, but time consuming.

(Mobility Workshop)

The most important part came after the draft was finished. I gathered some team members and some cross-team members — basically whoever would come sit with me and had them run through it to see if it made sense. They were brutal. It was great. A lot of this work happened after hours, so the language was at times, very stream of consciousness. Having people with varied familiarity with the topics covered allowed for some invaluable revisions.

Overall, the workshop proved to be a wonderful exercise in collaboration and teamwork, and regardless of how the actual workshop goes, it has left me better than I started, so that’s good enough.

Posted in Design & Modeling, Development, Open Source. Tags: collaboration, git, github, jquery, jQuery Mobile, mobile, RequireJS, workshop. Comments Off »

« Older posts « Accessibility, I’m Still Wrong!

Newer posts » Accessibility and Mobility and Web Development »

Academic Technology Group Developers Blog Education. This is how we do it.

Current Projects

Recent Posts

Archives

Meta