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The purpose of this blog is to chronicle my time spent working and learning in the Software Engineering Practicum at the College of Charleston. This class is meant to expose students to open source projects, and have them jump in and start contributing to these projects. The end goal is we, the students, develop our programming skills in a real world environment, and also better the programming world through our efforts. Later in the semester we will be attending the Palmetto Open Source Software Convention, or POSSCON for short. We will be meeting with members of the open source community and discussing their projects, and our own experiences in the open source community with them. I am actually looking forward to this event quite a bit, as other tech community events such as Charleston Barcamp and the Pecha Kucha talks have both provided excellent experiences to me.

As this is my first post, I suppose I will provide a slight introduction for myself. I am Micah Jenkins. I am a senior at the College of Charleston, majoring in Computer Science. I first began programming when I was a junior in high school, and grew to love it from there.

This class marks the second half of a yearlong class chain that focuses on software engineering, and the techniques and organization that the discipline requires. Last semester we were split into groups and required to develop an automated testing framework to test an open source project of our choosing in Linux. My group last semester worked on the Google Visualization suite, which is a tool for generating and manipulating data and outputting it into HTML code for embedding in websites.

My team generated 25 unique test cases that test different parts of  the source code, and an automated framework to run and report on these test cases. We also developed a poster that will be shown at the College's Math and Science Poster Session.

That experience was immensely valuable to me, and it really opened the door for this semester. We picked up many skills, such as usage of online repositories like subversion, knowledge of scripting to automate processes, and gaining familiarity with Linux (specifically the Ubuntu distribution). It was a great preparatory experience and got me excited to actually contribute to one of these projects this semester rather than just extensively test on one.

So far, we have created a class wiki where all of our class blogs are linked, and we are all going to be blogging about 1000 words a week on our progress. By the end of this projects, we hope to have contributed in some way to the open source project we choose as groups, whether this be by doing bug fixes, or trying to help out in the community. Some projects will be big, and others will be small. Some might even require their groups to create the community for them by setting up wikis and how-to instructions for building and running the code. The projects I have researched so far all seem to have middling to large communities, but I think that working on a small project could be a very rewarding experience as well. This project, and semester, looks to be quite an interesting one.