Week 1 Spring 2012 (1/27/2012)

Week 1 Spring 2012 (1/27/2012)

Spring Semester has started in full swing. After five weeks of winter break, it is welcome change to get back to work. We had a large number of students participating our first meeting. We do hope that initial enthusiasm continues and produce many useful projects.

We had five talks

1) Prof. Bulent Yener - Data Sciences Center

2) Dr. David Goldschmidt - Executive Officer, Computer Science Department

3) Peter Hajas

4) Joe Dougherty

5) Moorthy

Prof Yener outlined the activities thaat are being carried out in his center. He also mentioned aout the open data bank efforts at his center. There are many nice interesting projects. Please see http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~yener/DSRC/about.html for further details.

David Goldschidt talked about the software principle based on his software industrial experiences. David emphasized about version control, testing, documentation and design and code review. David even volunteered to review our codes.

Peter as usual gave an enthusiastic talk about being a RCOS member. Peter also outlined the code of conduct for RCOS members. Peter requested for more volunteers to be mentors.

Joe talked about the founder of RCOS and Sean O' Sullivan '85 and how his generosity helped fund RCOS Joe also mentioned about Dr. Luis Ibanez's course on Open Source Software Practice and Experience.

I mentioned about IRC channel and about the weekly updates of blogs, wiki and pushing the code. I also mentioned about office hours on Sundays from 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm.

We are off to a great start - Hope rest of the semester is as good as the first one!