TITLE: A Morning in the Life
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 12, 2010 7:41 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
My mailbox this morning contained a long complaint
from a student about a grade, a request to meet
with a faculty member about an issue he didn't
handle well this spring, a request for space for
summer undergrad research, news that a student
hold has been cleared so that a summer course can
be created, a spreadsheet of my department's
fiscal year-to-date spending for end-of-year
planning, calls from upper administration for
work on student outcomes assessment, merit pay
evaluations, and year-end faculty evaluation
letters, and several dozen miscellaneous messages.
That doesn't count mailing-list mail, both
professional and personal, which is procmailed
into separate boxes. Such is the life of a
department head.
I also received from a student a link to a negative
review of git. I am considering using distributed
VCS in my agile course, with git and Mercurial at
the top of the list. Do you have a suggestion?
Mercurial has been around longer, I think, and there
are some good tutorials on it. My students need to
get up to speed relatively quickly with the basic
use cases of whatever tool we use, for a team of
ten doing XP-style development.
After two days of class, I feel pretty good about
the prospects of this group of ten students. They
seem willing to collaborate and eager to learn. We
are taking to heart the agile value "Responding
to change over following a plan", with a change
to Ruby as our working language and (git | Mercurial)
as our VCS. This means I get to be agile, too, as I
prepare some new course materials built around Ruby,
Test::Unit, and so on. I'll be looking into
RubyMine
as an IDE with refactoring support. Do you have any
experience using it? Let me know.
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