Iris Classon
Iris Classon - In Love with Code

Refactoring and code reviewing my very first application- join an educational refactoring OSS project!

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My First School Project on Github

This application was a mini-CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) made in Windows Forms (we were not allowed to choose ourselves, and didn’t know anything else existed). On my team we were three developers, two of us had no programming experience from before, and one had done a year or two CS at uni. This was about 1 month into the education, and was our very first application aside from one console app. We had 10 days (7 working days) to do this, and the demands were:

  • Be able to save, edit and delete customers

  • Customer images

  • Create a booking calendar

  • Save, Edit and delete appointments

  • Track customer conversations/ notes

  • Sava data locally by serializing

  • No third party libraries allowed

  • Use an event

  • User friendly

  • Good design (UI)

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MyFirstProject9

MyFirstProject10

MyFirstProject11

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This was on a school day when we didn’t have any lectures, everybody would still come in and work.

Due to the size of the class we only did a live demo at the end, and never got any feedback on the code. This seems to be common at uni (although this was trade school), and I fully understand that. Unfortunately what happens is:

  1. The students don’t learn from their final result other than fail/pass. By the time you have something to compare to (the next project) you have forgotten what you did in the first

  2. The students don’t get used to code reviews and refactoring, and maybe that is why so many are scared of them- instead of embracing them

  3. The students don’t learn how to do refactoring/cleaning up, which for many will be a large part of what they will be doing as developers

For a long time I’ve wanted to do an OSS project, I’ve gotten to know so many fantastic people and I would love to learn and work together with them, with you. I just didn’t know what to do. What can I contribute? Well, by ugly ass code from my very first application- and a brilliant idea. That’s what I have.

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Some beautiful notes Kristoffer, AKA ‘Bobbe’, made from one of the SQL sessions we had. We used to, half-jokingly, post ‘handwritten notes’ on Facebook.

I want us, together to code review and refactor the application and make it available to other developers to learn, mainly students and junior developers, to see how we that know this (more or less ha ha) would go about cleaning up this code.

I know it might end up being hard to read from the changes, but I will document the changes with ‘before and after’ explaining based on the commit messages what was done and why. Since the application is small, but still has many basic common features such as CRUD operations, working with images, saving serialized data to a file, events (only one I believe), UX, working with calendars and so on.

I tried to make some rules that would help us better put this together, please let me know if you have some better ideas/additional ideas.

My First School Project on Github

‘Rules’

Keep third party libs to a minimum, use the smallest ones with the least dependencies

  • This makes the code easier to understand for students

For complete refactoring (for example to a different platform) please do a branch

  • This is so we can compare different ideas, and avoid conflicting ideas

Frequent small commits – but nothing that breaks the build!

  • You know why :)

Provide a description when you commit with what and why

  • This is so others can learn from this

Use Github Issues for codereview – each ‘comment’ can be an issue

  • I’m open to other ideas here :)

    Comments

    Leave a comment below, or by email.
    Daniel Forster
    12/17/2013 3:52:58 PM
    I'm not going to join in. Still have my own application to refactor if I want with the ummmm bug where people that got booked into a meeting never returned to the CRM properly ;) Love the idea Iris and I will follow it on github for sure! 
    Marcel Veldhuizen
    12/18/2013 1:28:10 AM
    Refactoring can be fun at times, so I will have a look.
    I don't really care much for messing with Windows Forms on my day off though, but perhaps there is some low hanging fruit elsewhere :)
    
    So far, I think it's actually sort of impressive for a first school project. 
    Marcel Veldhuizen
    12/18/2013 2:44:05 AM
    It seems I cannot push anything to the repository, by the way.
    I'm trying to commit to the master branch, but getting a 403 error. 
    Iris Classon
    12/18/2013 7:04:08 AM
    Reply to: Marcel Veldhuizen
    Strange, let me look into that 
    Marcel Veldhuizen
    12/19/2013 3:04:36 AM
    Reply to: Iris Classon
    I haven't used Git or GitHub extensively, so at first I thought I was doing something wrong. I think the repository is just not "world writable" however.
    I checked with one of my own repositories and frankly I cannot even find an option to make it world writable, just the option to add collaborators.
    It may be that GitHub does not allow this and wants you to use a fork & pull approach? 

Last modified on 2013-12-17

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