UCOSP Blog Post – October 2nd 2011

Our first week in UCOSP was amazing. We got the opportunity to meet the fellow students and mentors at the sprint which was crucial in breaking the ice. We strongly believe that meeting the team face to face is a great way to take the first step. We all went out on lunch on the first day and found out how Review Board came about and how over the years it has evolved into a code review tool used by several hundred of software development firms.

Although none of the students had ever used Review Board prior to UCOSP, Mike and David gave us a quick introduction on how it is used and the nitty gritty background details on how it works. We learned about Django web framework and how Review Board is built on top of it. We also learned how to use Git. At first it was a little daunting since it is different from all the version control tools that we had used before;  i.e staging files before you commit them etc. Last but not least, we also started on working on our individual projects and we dove right into the code which was awesome. David and Mike were there to help us every step of the way. All four students really enjoyed worked on their projects. Since review board has a fairly complex code base, it offers very interesting and mentally engaging projects. Jacob is working on user interface for diff viewer feature while Dave is working on adding new hashing features for diff files to reduce database usage. Yazan is working on new issue summary feature which would save time on conducting code reviews and Waleed is working on adding new functionality to track user changes. We all made good progress over the weekend. In fact, Jacob and Dave submitted their first code change for review!

Overall, code sprint was a great way to start of the semester. This semester is already looking very promising. We would like to thank Alan, Karen and Michelle for their warm hospitality.