Presenting my proof of concept – Week 7

Coming back from my week away, This is Malware had moved along and was much closer to being released than when I’d worked on it two weeks ago. There were still a few features that needed adding and I got to help out with some of those, mostly on hiding UI elements depending on user privileges. My next small helpful task was to test out some of the online eprints functionality after changes had been made to the plugin structure, reporting bugs back to Patrick who then fixed them.

I also got to help write up the documentation for the profiles.soton architecture options. Profiles.soton is a profiles system that is in the early stages of development. The documents and diagrams I helped put together are going to be taken to TAG, the Technical Architecture Group, on Monday morning. I’m hoping that my diagrams and analysis of the options will encourage the group to go for the cleanest solution in my opinion, which involves the most changes to existing systems and storing more information in the Active Directory but results in a cleaner more easily maintainable overall system. Moreover it will allow for other systems to easily follow suit once that extra information is easier to access all from one source. Systems currently gather this information from various disparate sources that could easily lead to inconsistency.

Next I carried out a small manual data management task for the eprints system. Since updating to Pure, the eprints “shelf” system broke, and instead articles now need to be added manually to a project. This was a simple task of copying and pasting publication ID numbers into the web application and adding the result to a project.

The most important part of my week, however, was preparing to present my proof of concept web application to Service Management on Friday morning. I’ve worked on this web application on and off for a few weeks, and this meeting originally seemed like the final full stop on the project. The original plan was that if Service Management wanted a system like this to be built that they’d request it from the team and have a project added to the pipeline for development in a few months, long after I’ve left.

Presentation Notes

However, the demo was met with a more positive response than I could have ever hoped for, and they asked if we could make this live as soon as possible. Suddenly, the code I’d thrown together in a language I’d not touched in years using technology I hadn’t really thoroughly researched was being added to the team igit, and I began kitting it out with a test suite. In hindsight, I should have designed the system more carefully, and it may be the case that a lot of it gets rewritten to make it suitable for actually going live. I believe by the time I’ve got this project ready for deployment, I’ll have really thoroughly learnt to always keep my code clean and maintainable regardless of it’s purpose and scope. As difficult as it will be to clean this up and get it production ready, I’m thrilled that something I’ve worked on during this internship could be live by the time I leave. My goal is to have it ready in time for Fresher’s Week so that new students adapting to life at the University will be able to take advantage of an open more accessible knowledge base.