Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Upcoming Work.
• What is this course?
• Course goals.
• Why this course?
• Course structure.
• (Possibly) setup time.

Preliminaries

Admin

• Welcome back! I think I know most of you, and I'm happy to be able to teach you again.
• But I'm still taking attendance.
• It's Friday. Please behave responsibly this weekend.
• CS Table Tuesday!
• You may not deprecate your self in this class (although you may occasionally use deprecated methods)

Upcoming Work

• Codecademy Ruby Tutorial for Monday. https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ruby
• EdX Ruby Exercises for Wednesday. (Details forthcoming in email.)

What is this course?

Course in how you build software

• Principles of good software
• Practices for building software

We will focus on

• Agile methods
• Software as a Service - Tools related to the Ruby on Rails platform

Course goals

What do you expect to see covered in this course? What do you want to see covered in this course?

• Make a list of five topics.
• In groups of three, share your answers with each other.
  • This is an opportunity to make sure that all of you talk.
  • This is an opportunity to make sure that we get a variety of ideas heard.

Your ideas

• Stages of software design: How you go from idea to implementation
  • and how you get to finished product
• Making things in different languages play well together
• Security. Note that we have a separate security course.
• Working in a team
  • Organizing code
  • Delegation or sharing of responsibilities
  • The wonder of branching / versioning
  • Documentation
  • Project management - tasks, timeline, workload, etc.
• Building extensible software
• "Programming in the large"
  • Teams
  • Larger codebases; potentially large enough that you won't know everything
  • Joining an existing project
  • Length
  • Scaling
• Legacy code
• User Experience (UX) - We have a course on the books on Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Maybe we'll offer it some time.
• Deploying software.
• Supporting software. (Well designed software is easier to support.)
• Software "smells" - What makes software good or bad.
• Some technologies
  • Ruby
  • Rails
  • Github
  • SQL
• Using vs. building tools. (Probably not too much.)
• Design patterns: MVC, Factory, etc.
• Writing and using specifications
• General experience
• Quality assurance / risk assurance / TLAs / etc.
• Debugging.
• Testing. TDD and BDD

Why this course?

Why are you here?

• Resume building; makes students more employable; retainable
• Required for the major
• Teamwork. It was okay in 151, 161, and 207. Let's hope it works even better this time. Maybe if we talk more about structure it will make it awesome.
• Tools to work on personal projects.
• Learn how to deal with too many things being thrown at you.

Course structure

• Seven week course, three days per week.
• During this half of the semester, you are expected to do about twelve hours per week on this class.
• Some days: Work on a lab assignment in teams.
• Some days: Discuss readings/videos.

(Possibly) setup time

Sign up for accounts on

a. http://github.com

b. http://edge.edx.org

c. http://www.edx.org

d. http://grinnell-cs.slack.com

e. http://c9.io

f. https://www.codecademy.com/

g. https://trello.com/

h. https://www.heroku.com/

Start the Codecademy Ruby Tutorial.

https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ruby