Keeping an Open Mind

Just when we thought it was over, we had to look over more code. There wasn’t much time to rest, after a long and learning experience of creating an open source program. Our professor didn’t want us to take our eye off the ball, so he wanted for us to look over other group’s projects.

Giving

After examining other project code files, I see that everyone has some similar and different ideas in approaching the same problems. Some of the ideas I saw will possibly help in improving my group’s program, and I’m pretty sure other groups that reviewed our project will get some ideas too. It’s like Christmas, a time to give and take, as well as to share. Another thing I got from evaluating other projects was when suggesting on handling a problem, it was like a suggestion to me as well.

Recieving and The Google Experience

Using Google’s reviewing tool was a good learning experience. At first it seemed simple to use, just double clicking on lines I saw interesting enough to comment on. Although when I was finished with all my comments on a single file and clicked on save for each of the comments; a “publish your comments” link should have appeared at the right hand side of the screen, but it was nowhere to be found. So I thought I had lost all my input, then I clicked to go back to the previous page and then clicked to go back into the same file and all of a sudden the “publish your comments” link was there. Once I clicked on the link I was able to see all the comments I made for that file, the sad thing was that I had to repeat this process for every file I reviewed.

When it was time to see what others commented for my group project, it was actually frustrating for me to view the comments. I would go to a file that was commented on, for some reason no comments would appear anywhere. I explore and looked over and over everything that made any sense to enable me to see the comments from others, but couldn’t find anything. So I remembered Philip, a classmate that reviewed the project code, sent an email to me with a link to what he commented on. I followed the link and “BADA BING” the comments appeared, both his and others.

Not Narrow Minded

The comments we received was not much, but very valuable. Some of the comments pointed out issues we over looked, others were praises for good ideas on how to handle problems other people encountered. This experience was not at all degrading; we took every idea for improvement with an open mind. In our next opportunity of looking over other projects, I would be better prepared on using Google Project Hosting in the code commenting area. Also to give more detailed comments and offer more ideas, hoping they will be open minded as well.