Hawaiian Programmer

This is how we do! Yeah, chillin, laid back....

[softwareprogrammerhi-blog]

Fall 2015

Sometimes we go through life's obstacles and forget our responsibilities to ourself. Over the course of this semester I lost touch with who I intended to be. Working two jobs was difficult, but I've learned so much. Taking a python class only improved my knowledge and skill set for my job. This semester I wasn't sure of what I should make for my final project. I looked into salt, but couldn't find anything useful that I could create with salt minions and master topography. So I came up with the idea of making modifications to source code that I created for my second job. My second job has always been hush hush, so taking on this task would require people to have knowledge of where I work and what I do. I am a part time consultant at a up and coming telescope(or at least I hope)

Any who, getting to my project and future plans. For my project I used some powerful we scraping tools from beautifulsoup and also some excel tools from openpyxl. My project aimed to retried information from discussion boards that were posted to the repositories website. Initially the code could only scrape basic information and was unable to get the responses that users created. With some fine tuning it was created to where using this script we could scrape user feedback in accordance to machining parts for a telescope. Future endeavors for this code is to have it be more smart. I intend on creating a GUI for the scripts that are created and at the click of a button the GUI can run tasks and reports that the user requests. This way the user wouldn't actually need any code and wouldn't have to know how to run the code. They would only have to learn the GUI. Creating a GUI is a daunting task to me, but I believe with the tools I learned from CS294 I can accomplish great things.

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Git Branching

Version Control

In the ever changing field that is software development, we as software engineers/developers will have to learn version control. Version control is the concept that there exists software built specifically for the need of tracking changes made in the development process of code. All changes that are committed are linked to a specific person and a specific time. This way a development team can compare, restore, move about, and merge certain changes. One of the widespread software used it Git. GitHub offers version control to its users and aids them in ensuring that all code is kept up to standards.

Learning Experience

This semester at school has taught me that there are other valuable skills required to work in the engineering discipline of Software. When I initially began this semester I had no concept of version control. That is not something that was mentioned or really covered in most of my undergrad career. With minimal focus on this skill, I began working at a very large telescope project office. Once I began understanding what was expected of me, I came to the realization that this is a skill that is expected of Software developers. With this now in my mind, I began experimenting and learning more about Git and branching to ensure version control.

Teaching

Once I learned more about GitHub and how it worked I was tasked in my workplace to draw up some documentation for how certain tasks should be accomplished. I began this task and thought that I had finished it, however, after some thought and reevaluation I realized that I am not a professional at this and as I learn and evolve, so will my methods and documentation. I find it quite helpful to take some tutorials, such as: GitHub Branching following this link will take you to a #nifty website that’ll walk you through and draw diagrams for you so it is easier to understand. One thing I noticed about GitHub, if you plan on becoming someone who contributes to a project, you HAVE to know your version control.

Things I learned:

Pushing (not in a rude way :P)

Pushing is the act of pushing your changes to a local branch of code to a remote repository. I work in a collaborative Python environment with GitHub as our medium for storing scripts. Pushing to the repository from command line is a valuable tool that is used to update the team on changes and updates to the code. I learned this talent from this website. (I like making hyperlinks)

Syncing:

Another useful thing I learned from working collaboratively is Syncing. Any time you work in a collaborative environment, this is how you keep your local copy up to date with the current version. In speaking to the beginning of this post, version control is very important. Version control allows us to make sure that in a working environment everyone is on the same page and able to complete work in an appropriate way.

Wrapping Up:

To wrap up this blog post, I just wanna say that through this Python experience I gained a lot of new knowledge that I don't think I would've learned in the academic environment. CS 294 at University of Hawaii at Hilo, taught me skills that have made me into a valuable asset in a corporation that requires skills in GitHub.

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System’s Engineering

I spoke with Scott Roberts who works with a large observatory and he gave me helpful advice and pointers for python developers. Working with a “Start Up” there is a lot of work that has to go into creating the systems and background applications that allow the company to work efficiently. Anytime a new telescope comes into creation scientists and engineers from other telescopes are recruited. Scott being one of them, has vast knowledge in programming and was able learn python and routines needed to be an effective programmer. 

The first thing that Scott noted was necessary was Branching in GitHub

He always stresses the importance of branching as to not change the original code and create possible problems with other artifacts involved. Branching is a necessity when you are collaborating on any project or repository.

Scott also mentioned that when collaborating on a project it is always good to have a workflow management system so you can track the progress of assigned tasks.

Having a list of assigned tasks that work can be logged in, assists collaborators in following progress as it goes through a logical workflow.

All in all I would say that with proper guidance, good practices can be learned and employed in daily life as being a:

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

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Expectations

Some of the things that I think about in taking this CS 294 class is just the basics of using Python and what it can be used for.  I was offered a remote position coding, but they would like me to code in Python.  So ultimately my goal is to utilize all tools that Python has to offer to increase productivity of the configuration management department (Defined in last post- lols)

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Data Sharing in the 21st Century

Data sharing is something that I would say is a valuable asset in the 21st century.  Many times data is requested to complete comprehensive studies.  In the scientific field information in general is something that should be shared.      Over the summer I interned at a telescope project, on this project I worked in the Configuration Management(see def. below) department.  Through configuration management I have learned extensive information about sharing information and data.  In the telescope community, communication and data sharing is vital.  In processes such as reviews and approval data sharing it is of utmost importance.  

When systems and subsystems go into review and approval cycles a group of technical leaders are assigned to review the documents referenced and ensure the validity of the research.  To validate all findings the technical group needs to ensure that the numbers can be reproduced so using data sharing software such as Xerox DocuShare documents and data are shared.  

The next step involved was reproducibility.  If the data can be reproduced then we can validate the correctness.  Being able to complete this step the technical review team can then give a stamp of approval or offer improvements to the document and subsequently other documents affected.

Data sharing was a concept that I was heavily involved in during my summer internship.  In my personal opinion it is something that is necessary for completion of all projects associated with the data.  However, it should be noted that with any document or data there should be appropriate labels as well as appropriate instruction sets.  When I speak of having sufficient documentation (instruction sets) I mean that in quite a literal way.  Over the summer I was provided source code and in that source code i realized that no functions were documented and neither were the variable declarations.  In seeing this I understand the importance of having proper documentation.  It essentially took me 4 weeks to read through the source code and attempt to decipher what each function was capable of doing and etc.

LESSON LEARNED: ALWAYS DOCUMENT ALL CODE AND ALL STEPS IN COMPLETING COMPLEX PROCESSES!

Configuration Management: A Systems Engineering process in which establish & maintain product performance, attributes with its requirements, design, information through life

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MODULE 1

I will be using a MacBook Pro, running OSX (obviously).  I will most likely be using a Python IDLE for all program development.  I am not quite sure about what specifically I will be working on, but I will be working part time with a Telescope to develop some scripts to pull information from their database and write them to excel workbooks.  I am also not sure about using special apps. Any who, this is my first blog post for the class.