User:Tom.naps

Tom Naps

For over 20 years Tom Naps was the primary Computer Science instructor at a small liberal arts college (Lawrence University in Appleton WI) where the Computer Science concentration was integrated into a Mathematics major. Currently he is completing his 14th year in a seven-member Computer Science Department at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Tom is an active contributor to two large open-source projects in algorithm visualization. The first of these, JHAVE, delivers instructional visualizations on algorithms that span the entire curriculum. It relies on a client-server architecture, with both the client and server written in Java. Since 2011 he has been actively involved in the OpenDSA (Open Data Structures and Algorithms) project hosted at Virginia Tech. The client software for OpenDSA is developed in JavaScript, and that is where Tom has focused his efforts. The server back-end is currently written in Python using the Django framework.

At UWOshkosh, Tom has taught most of the courses in the curriculum. In particular he often teaches a project-oriented Software Engineering II course, and it is in that course that he hopes to incorporate HFOSS.

Intro IRC Activity, Answers to Part 1 questions

• How do people interact? Conversationally, using short phrases with the emphasis on communicating the essential meaning of what they intend to say instead of on the grammatical correctness

• What is the pattern of communication? At least in the sample meeting, I would characterize the pattern as an initial session in which the participants reported on progress made and problems encountered since the last meeting. Each reported item was followed by a brief discussion. This initial session was followed by a wrap-up session in which goals were established to hopefully be reached before the next meeting.

• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning? The meetbot tags (indicated by # and the green font) help to organize the way one reads the transcript of the meeting. In a sense they breakdown the meeting into a hierarchical structure -- with #topics broken down into #info and #action items.

• Can you make any other observations? I would think that the transcript of the meeting is most useful if one of the participants uses it to write up a set of minutes for the meeting as soon as possible after the meeting concludes. That set of minutes then becomes the official record of the meeting, providing a much more readable form than the transcript itself.

Intro to IRC Activity Part 3 – Join and Observe Channel Discussion

I joined and observed the discussion at the #OpenMRS IRC chat. Perhaps not unexpectedly, this was much more freeform than the organized meeting, the logs of which we read and wrote about in the answers to the Part 1 questions. There was no organization of topics using the #topic tag that we had seen in the logs of the session from Part 1. Instead many of the posts to the OpenMRS chat were just (apparently automated) notices from "OpenMRSBot" that a member of the project had posted an issue/update at the project's repository. So in that sense, listening in on the #OpenMRS channel would help to keep me posted on the most recent activity at the repository. Other entries at the #OpenMRS IRC chat seemed to be questions from various participants of the form "How do I ...?" There were many more questions posed than answers given, although in some cases respondents to the question would provide a link the questioner could chase down to at least find resources that might help.