GSoC 2014: Week 4 Update

Greetings all! Welcome to Week 4 of Google Summer of Code 2014. There are only 2 weeks until mid-term evaluations begin!

  • How many community members - other than your mentor(s) - have you communicated with so far?
  • How many new friends do you have?

We hope the answer to those questions is growing every week. If not, think about how you can make that happen! That said, here are your announcements for the week from @surangak and me:

  1. Before the midterm evaluations begin (23 June 19:00 UTC) you need to prepare a short (plan for between 5 and 10 minutes) presentation video about the current state of your project. Upload this video to YouTube and embed it in a post in a new topic here on OpenMRS Talk. Use the “GSoC” category and title your topic like: GSoC 2014: PROJECT NAME Midterm Presentation.
  2. There are many free and open source software applications and free web services that can help you record a screencast. As you search and find good ones, you can add your suggestions here to share with other students.
  3. Your video should primarily be a demonstration of your current application, a walkthrough or highlights of the code you’ve written, and/or some slides that describe your design process. Talk with your mentors to decide what should be shown in the video.
  4. Encourage the community to respond with questions and comments about your work! As they post follow-up replies in your topic, please be ready to respond with answers, or even a follow-up video to demonstrate answers if appropriate.
  5. Finally, remember to continue with the excellent blog posts, status reports, and daily IRC scrum updates. We haven’t seen some of you in our daily IRC scrum meetings, and hope you’ll start attending soon.

When you have a few moments, I encourage you to check in on some of the other students’ blog posts at http://planet.openmrs.org/ and comment on their posts. I’m sure they’d appreciate hearing from you, and some will probably return the favor on your posts!

Once again, please share your ideas about screencast tools here. We look forward to seeing your progress in the next 1 to 2 weeks!

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Oh, sorry @michael

It’s been very exciting and funny these days working with @elliott and others. But sorry about the daily scrum… I have some issues connecting to the irc channel. And since my project are very different from the other, (the only node.js project), normaly I just communicate with @elliott. I thought it will be ok…

Anyway, I’ll try to figure out a way, thanks for the heads-up, you’ll see me soon. :smiley:.

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Hi @plypy! [quote=“plypy, post:2, topic:259”] But sorry about the daily scrum… I have some issues connecting to the irc channel. [/quote]

Don’t stress too much about IRC. We know that (a) some people have technical difficulties in connecting, and (b) some people have serious time-zone conflicts with the scrum. For those who have trouble connecting to IRC, please have a look at Freenode’s site, particularly: https://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml

However, challenges aside, there are 3 great benefits of the daily IRC scrum:

  1. It’s a good tool to help you review your accomplishments from the prior day, and your plans for the next day.
  2. Gives you an opportunity to share your blockers/challenges with others. You never know when someone has encountered a similar problem! Maybe you’ll find an answer during the scrum.
  3. The scrum is a great time to get to know the other developers and what they’re working on. You might find something very interesting to work on, or to learn more about.

Hope to see you when your time and technology permits!

@plypy, would it be convenient if I gave a brief update for you when you’re unavailable? That way, at least we’re able to get the word out on what’s being developed.

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Ehhh, thanks.

Don’t worry, I can figure it out soon.

Hi all, I tried a screencast tool , it works on Windows and Mac. Here’s the link to the screen cast tool http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/ .

Cheers Aniketha

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Hi guys and girls,

For Ubuntu and UNIX users, you probably can use SimpleScreenRecorder

It’s easy to use, and there is a wiki to choose correct parameters to record videos for YouTube.

You can report bugs, get sources and contribute on there Github account :octocat:

See You :wink:

Alexis

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Some suggestions for videos:

  • Start out by thinking about the 3-5 key points you want to get across to people about your project and make sure you get these across clearly.

  • Start your demonstration with a brief background – i.e., name of your project, your name, mentor name(s), and then give a brief (~30 seconds) description of the purpose of your project. Don’t assume that people watching the video know anything about your project (define acronyms or abbreviations the first time you use them, give a sentence description of special technologies or organizations the first time you name them, etc.).

  • Try to make your demo video closer to 3-5 minutes rather than 10 minutes in length. If it needs to go over 5 minutes, make sure you make all of your important points in the first 5 minutes.

  • At the end, give people some direction of where to go for more information (e.g., your project wiki page, your blog, an OpenMRS Talk topic, and/or your IRC nick, etc.).

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One more thing … in your post below where you embed your YouTube video, briefly summarize some questions you have for people watching your presentation. Encourage them to reply to your post with their own questions or answers to your own.

Good luck! :slight_smile:

Hi Everyone,

Mac computers have Quicktime Player which has built in screen capture software that looks like it has decent resolution (I guess we’ll see how it looks on YouTube soon).

Steve

1 Like