Lecture 26

Lecture 26, Mon 03/08

Mon Lecture: Information about final presentations

Thank you for your patience and hard work

This course has been really challenging for all of us:

All of the students
All of the staff (TA/LAs/and the instructor)

I hope the struggle was worth it.

A reminder to complete online course evaluations before the deadline, which is likely sometime this Friday.

These are team projects

There isn’t a point when you say “I’ve done all of my work, I’m walking away, the rest is up to you”.

The team is responsible for the work. It’s important to show up for your team, and support your fellow team members.

2nd Catme survey:DEADLINE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT, STRICT

The second Catme survey is out now, due midnight tonight.

Last time, I chased people down, issued extensions and sent out multiple reminders.

This time, I’m not going to do that. Please get it done by midnight tonight;there is a participation grade at stake.

There will be one final survey after the final presentations; the second and third will be used in determining final course grades.

(First one was just a baseline.)

Reminder about extra credit research survey also…

If you participated in the extra credit research survey, the follow up to that will be coming out during finals week. Watch for that.

Notes:

✱ Fixing merge conflicts isn’t necessarily a “one and done” situation. As new code is merged into main, new merge conflicts that were not there before may arise. Often those arise because of code from your own team that got merged into main. So keep an eye on your PRs.

The same thing can happen with tests; tests that didn’t fail before can start failing as code is merged to main, and you rebase on main. So know that it isn’t a “one and done” proposition. You have to keep iterating until your PR gets merged.

✱✱ The description doesn’t have to be super long. But it should be more than just “fixed issue #30”. It should give the reader an idea, from a user perspective, on what changed in the app. It is helpful to note:

What navigation does the user need to do in order to see the change? I.e. what menu, what page, what sequence of actions?
One way to do this is to use “before” and “after” screen shots or even better, animated gifs.
- The tool Licecap which is free and open-source, and available for Windows and Mac can make animated gifs really easily that you can just drag into your description.
- Example: Before and after on ucsb-courses-search PR 76
- Example: Before and after on mapache-search PR 64

Final Presentation

You may do it live, or you may do it pre-recorded via Video (uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo, or any other video sharing service.).

Here’s a tutorial video on making demo videos from CS48 S20 (Video inception)

Based on the experience of CS48 students, pre-recording is strongly recommended. You will know for sure in advance whether the demo is successful, and whether or not you’ve hit the target length of 5-10 minutes.

Your video should be 5 to 10 minutes long, and cover these points:

First, mention the names of the members of the team, and introduce the person narrating the video.
- It is ok if all the team members appear in the video. It is also ok if only one person narrates the video on behalf of the team.
Second, go through each of the features that your team worked on that were merged into main
- Only demo the features that were merged into main
- Focus in this part of the video on demoing the features from a user perspective, not on the technical details of how they were implemented.
Next, if there is time remaining to reach the 5-10 minute mark, you may briefly cover any technical and/or non-technical challenges your team faced
- You don’t have to cover everything.
- You don’t really even have to include this part if your demo already hits the 5-10 minute range.
- If you do include this part, focus on the items that you think would be interesting to the audience (fellow students in CS156 F20, and the staff of CS156 F20).
- Possible items to include
  - Particularly interesting technical details of what you had to write in the code
  - Challenges in testing
  - Challenges in team communication and organization, and what you did to overcome those
Optional: at the end, if you like, you may thank anyone that was particularly helpful to the team from the staff (TAs and LAs, or students from other teams).
- Please don’t include thanks to me (Prof. Conrad) in the video; I don’t want this to be an exercise in brown-nosing.
- If you do want to express gratitude, feel free to share your thoughts with me on the Slack, by email, etc.

Please then also poll your team members and let me know your thoughts about the privacy of your final demo video:

public, available to anyone that is interested in the app and the course
unlisted, but ok to make it available to future CMPSC 156 students (as an example, and to orient them to the app)
unlisted, and only shown once for this team’s final demo, and to course staff