The Plugin, the Sprint, the Speech, and the Workshop

To use a word such as 'eventful' for this week would likely be the understatement of the century. In the short span of 5 days, the Webmaker team at CDOT managed to implement and demo a barebones functional version of a Brackets extension called Wavelength, and crack down on the remaining issues in the Filer codebase in order to ready it for porting into MakeDrive. In between all of this, fellow team member Kieran Sedgwick and I were sent out on our first workshop for the Toronto District School Board, and earlier in the week I was able to harness my communication skills and impromptu charm by welcoming a visit from high profile individuals.

In the spirit of honesty and accuracy, the work on the brackets extension did start on Friday, but that shouldn't take anything away from the tenacity and talent of the team being able to dive straight into a brand new API and push up a functional extension within less than 10 hours of work per person. Credit and thanks should be given to Adobe for not only creating sufficiently thorough documentation to peruse through in times of need, but for uploading templates and specific examples for starting to build extensions that proved to be paramount in our ability to create ours in such a demanding timeframe. My particular contribution was implementing the toolbar icon and the events necessary to emulate the standard behaviour relating to mouse movement and action - changing background colour when hovering over the icon and changing the icon's colour when clicked on or activated. The biggest logical hump for me to overcome was having to wrap my head around the fact that Brackets elements are all effectively DOM elements; I was looking for an API-specific function or parameter that would invoke or manipulate the toolbars when in actuality these are all DOM elements controlled by standard javascript calls and CSS classes. Extremely neat.

Filer work made up the bulk of the development work for the week, and the experience was the first true test of what is likely to come in the near future in regards to the independent workflow process. When the rest of the team was focused on their own respective tasks, and project lead David Humphrey is juggling 50 other issues at any given time, I was largely left up to my own devices and ken in order to solve any blockers that obstructed my progress. IRC is always there, but honestly it could never amount up to the quality of a peer's physical presence. Quite overwhelming at first. Filer's codebase is relatively vast in comparison to what I am used to working with up until now, and file system logic is brand new territory for me. Combine those factors with a rather outdated documentation and the questions started piling up quickly from under the woodwork. Once I gathered enough context about the variables and functions involved and more insight into assertion-agnostic unit testing, everything else eventually fell into place with the exception of a few kinks. Testing the logic proved to be a challenge as well since I was requested to run the unit tests on a local server instance to emulate an environment that accommodates CORS mechanisms. Mac OS X builds have apache2 built in to serve webpages locally, but being able to properly implement that also ended up needing the seasoned and extremely capable hands of Chris Tyler, OSTEP team's project lead and veteran linux wizard. Apache2 is overly restrictive in its document path hierarchy and file permission structure. I initially thought that placing a symbolic link of my index.html entry point in the default path given in the httpd.conf file. That proved to be unsuccessful, so Chris needed to change the default path to start at my Document file tree and set the chown group of all the inner files and folders to the "staff" moniker in my case with lastly the addition of granting read and execute permissions to the "other" octet (chmod 755, or similar). Allowing symlinks is apparently a dangerous course of action that opens your files to attacks. All in all, I managed to send pull requests of two issues related to filer by the end of the week, ultimately surpassing my own goals in the end.

Thursday was reserved for the workshop activities at Kennedy Public School for a grades 6-8 career day. Kieran and I agreed on engaging the children in a relatively simple task of creating a webpage with their own background colour and URL-sourced image anchor using Webmaker's Thimble editor. Initially, we believed there would be enough time for the students to look for and find the syntax required to achieve the task on their own, but for many of them the learning curve was a bit much and we quickly adapted ourselves to nudge and help them along in the right direction. Nearly everyone was attentive and listening, and we were pleased to see some cases of genuine interest and comprehension of what they were looking at and doing. It was a smooth, productive day and I'd like to think that we've helped nurture the future software development giants of tomorrow some way, shape, or form.

I conclude with a pleasant surprise this week when one of the ICT professors dropped by the office with a pair of executive academic representatives. I had the opportunity to give them a quick overview of our project, and tried my best to add as much genuine personality into the conversation as I could while keeping a professional manner. It's wonderful experience for anyone who wants to refine or nurture their interpersonal skills in a more improvisational dynamic. These kinds of meetings often lead to invaluable networking channels that will reward you in waves later on. Wonderful stuff.