My First Blog Post Ever

Welcome to my blog! ...and that's the only thing that I can think to say. It's funny how the human mind works, or doesn't work, sometimes. I read blogs, such as engadget and IGN, on a daily basis, and yet I haven't the faintest idea how to begin this post or what the finished product is supposed to look like. Should my blog be purely academic and concise or should it be more informal and contain my personal experiences as well? From my understanding, the purpose of blogging in this course is to document the students' progress with a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) project and any lessons learned or actions taken along the way. This interpretation suggests that the learning experience is just as important as the actual outcome; therefore, I will do my best to include a succinct summary of any discoveries and/or accomplishments as well as an in-depth look into the thoughts and/or personal decisions that brought me there.

There are three requirements for our first homework assignment:

1. Create a public, professional blog
2. Join the class Wiki and link to our blog
3. Register for POSSCON

I have completed these requirements and the assigned readings. Chapters 1 and 2 of the TOS (Teaching Open Source) textbook introduce a troubling problem that has only recently come to my attention. Most of my experience in the classroom so far is with programs that I made from scratch. In earlier classes, collaboration and/or reuse of existing code is frowned upon because there is a need to test students' fundamental knowledge of computer science. As a Senior, my relative inexperience with large, full-scale software is rather disconcerting. If I had known about the usefulness of FOSS much earlier in my career, I would have allotted more time to such studies. Luckily, I am not completely unfamiliar with large systems. My internship over the summer and some of my previous classes introduced me to a few of these systems. Last semester, I had the pleasure of working with OpenMRS, but I learned the pain of dealing with undocumented and/or abandoned software before choosing OpenMRS for my final project. With these experiences in mind, I will look over possible FOSS candidates in an even greater detail. I do not want to repeat the same mistakes I made last semester.