Final Thoughts

This is it.  It's all come down to this.  Tomorrow is the last day of classes, team presentations will be May 2nd, and then the semester is over.  So this will be my last blog post for this class.  That being said, I want to discuss how I felt about the class and give some well-deserved thanks...


Overall Experience
Aside from the frustrations I had trying to get RMH Homebase to work on my machine (which is still a no-go), my experience in this course has been a good one.  I'm honestly just not that fond of that particular project, which is why I'm eternally grateful to each of my team members for not considering that project for our team project this semester.  I feel that, when looking at some of the code, it just wasn't as thoroughly thought out as it should have been.  Like my classmates Marianne Rogers and Trevor Mehard said during their experience presentation, I hope the author of Software Development will pick a different project for the next edition of the book.


I liked the Teaching Open Source online textbook.  Not only does it discuss open source, it IS open source, and I loved that.  The exercises were great in each chapter of TOS and really got you to understand exactly what you were reading and doing.  This should definitely be made a permanent fixture in the required textbooks for this class.  I honestly feel that I learned more from this book than I did from the other textbook.


The lectures we had were different from any other course I took this semester because Dr. Bowring didn't sit there and lecture us; he sort of let us do the lecturing.  For every assignment we had, we would sit in class and share our experiences and thoughts about it with everyone.  We'd discuss what went right, what went wrong, what we liked, what we didn't like....collaboration was encouraged.  I also felt the assignments related to what we were doing as well.  We were allowed to use the blogs of other students in the class as a reference if we got stuck, and we were also allowed to work with a partner on assignments if we had difficulties.  The best part of this course was getting to go to POSSCON.  It was incredible and I got to meet so many interesting and amazing people, and I learned a lot about open source software there.


Thank Yous
I'd like to start off by saying that overall, this has been a great course.  A lot of classes you take in computer science will only go so far as to teach you the theory behind the things you have to do in the real world.  This class has been different.  Dr. Bowring let us go beyond that and get a taste of what working on software projects in the real world can be like.  So thank you, Dr. Bowring, for that.


A HUGE thank you goes out to Scott Rosenbrook and Erin McCall.  Without your blogs as a guide I would not have been able to get as far as I did on some of the assignments.


Thanks to the XBMC Community for allowing my teammates and I to work on your project. It was an awesome experience.


Finally, to my teammates: Jimmy Joy, Jason Leonard, David Schirduan, and Matthew Vaveris....I could not have asked for a better group of guys to work with.  Thanks for being awesome, guys.  And we're going to rock that team presentation :).