User:Ssheth

Swapneel Sheth

Swapneel Sheth is a Lecturer in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania.

His research and teaching interests are Software Engineering, Privacy, and the Web.

Stage 1 Part A

Intro to IRC

Part 1

1. How do people interact?
   • In an informal manner
2. What is the pattern of communication?
   • Usually question and answer - somebody has a question or a problem, other tries to help solve it
3. Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?
   • The chat bot commands
4. Can you make any other observations?
   • It's nice to have the meeting transcribed by meetbot in a relatively easy manner, with annotations

Part 3

I've been following the #ushahidi channel periodically, but it seems to have very little activity.

I've looked at other interesting (to me) open-source channels - #rvm, #ruby-lang, #rubyonrails. These are a lot more active and seem to have two kinds of questions.

1. I'm stuck.. help me with X
   • In this case, people are trying to install/work with some software and getting error messages. This seems like a faster, earlier version of StackOverflow for people to get answers.

1. What is a good way to do X?
   • In this case, people are unsure what's a "good" (optimal, efficient, faster, better) way of doing something. They want advise from the more-seasoned users in the channel. Comparing to StackOverflow, I see this as a big advantage as something "subjective" is not a good question to ask on StackOverflow.