Hey everyone and welcome to your favourite blog!

This week has been pretty uneventful and honestly not my most productive week. I’ll try to pick up the pace next week and really do a lot of hands on stuff.

Selenium continued

Recap: 7000 records on Pure have a link that needs to be removed; we are only allowed to do it through the web interface. Last week I made a script that more or less does the job. I tested it on 50 records and it worked. I spoke to the relevant person and they came this Monday to see it in action. They were very impressed because it looks like a phantom that uses the internet.

Here’s what needs to happen from now on:

• Patrick needs to approve the code
• Appsman team need to confirm that we’re allowed to run Selenium on Pure
• A person from Pure needs to confirm the same thing
• The code will then be tested on the dev version of Pure where the database has been copied fairly recently
• If all goes well, it can run on the live Pure :O

After I showed the script to the person I’m making it for, I worked on cleaning it up and making it more aesthetically pleasing to the programmer.

Q&A System Planning Continued

Last week I emailed Nick Gibbins with an idea for a system which allows students to send questions to lecturers anonymously. It also allows lecturers to share their answers with everyone so that people don’t keep asking the same questions. His feedback was that the anonymity feature should be dropped. I personally am quite fond of that feature because it has no equivalent currently. So I decided to propose a system with optional anonymity. I am having a meeting with him on Monday to see what he thinks of my idea.

Here are the features I’ve settled on:

• Website linked on the module pages of the ECS Intranet
• Students can send questions to the module team regarding the module
• Students can tick a box which makes them “anonymous” i.e. hides their identity from the lecturers
• Lecturers can answer a question
• Lecturers can make an answer public which shares it with everyone on the module
• Lecturers can dismiss a question if it isn’t worth replying to
• Lecturers can report a question which temporarily bans the sender from using the system
• Lecturers can tag a previously answered question in their reply to a question
• Students can tag a previously answered question in a new question
• Students & lecturers can control what email notifications they receive

I’ve tried to achieve a balance between students and lecturers so that my system doesn’t get completely rejected by teaching staff. Here are some of my arguments as to why:

• Appealing to students because
  • It sends questions directly to lecturers, which is valuable
  • It allows anonymity, which means shy people are more likely to ask a question
  • It keeps track of all the questions that have been asked and answered in the same place
• Appealing to lecturers because
  • It allows them to share their answers with everyone so that they don’t have to answer the same question multiple times
  • Pages for modules will be set up with no action needed from lecturers
  • It isn’t truly anonymous so offensive users can be identified
  • It can be switched off entirely by the module leader

I also made a big set of interactive wireframes which I highly recommend checking out.

>>>WIREFRAMES

PRO TIP: click on the play button on the top right for immersive experience

I also started writing down the formal requirements (user stories) in a word document by following another requirements document from our team. I did the wireframes first to make it clearer for myself what I wanted to do.

Tiny bit of Laravel and mod_auth_mellon

I also watched a couple more Laracasts which were on authentication. It looks like Laravel makes it really easy to set things up.

On Wednesday, me and Kev had a meeting with Clayton who explained to us what mod_auth_mellon is and how we might use it to authenticate our users. Kev understood everything and I understood almost nothing due to my lack of prior knowledge about that stuff. Oh well! I’ll learn it as I go.

Staff Party

I was the only person from TID Web who attended the Staff Party on Wednesday. I went with a bunch of interns and we had a good time. I got two ice cream cones because the second time I was able to cut the line to where my friends were. The lines were crazy long – I guess it was hard to find a second ice cream tricycle for the occasion.

THE END – SEE YOU NEXT WEEK