Bootstrapping an Undergraduate Programming Corps in Ruby on Rails

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Bootstrapping an Undergraduate Programming Corps
in Ruby on Rails
Course

• Armando Fox, Will Sobel, Michael Armbrust, David
  Patterson,and 27 brave undergraduates

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RAD Lab Vision
Web 2.0 apps
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Why this course?

• Train students
• RoR, agile development, AJAX/user interfaces,
  deployment management, ...
• Attract end users to RAD Lab platform
• Student-conceived apps generate traffic
• We provide hosting service
• Exercise RAD Lab infrastructure
• Deploy apps using Declarative Datacenter
• Stress test with workload generator
• Predict performance with AWE, predict power with
  DRAPE
• Debug performance problems using trace

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Why RoR?

• We believe RoR will have lasting impact
• Tastefully chosen features in language
  framework combine best ideas from programming
  language literature
• Bootstrap RoR expertise within EECS
• Exceptionally rapid prototyping of Web 2.0 apps
• Incremental development
• Sophisticated UI support
• Rapid bootstrapping doesnt require learning bad
  habits

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Target Model Enrollment

• Guided individual study, 1 unit, P/NP
• Pent-up demand 74 came to first meeting, 27
  enrolled, limit 30
• Prereq B in CS intro. prog. structures (61A)
• Near term Self-sustaining, extracurricular
  programming club
• pioneered by CS lecturer Dan Garcia
• Students retake for credit multiple times
• Veterans help bootstrap apprentices
• Long term Package into self-paced course

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Weekly lectures labs

• 2-hr Lectures introduce Rails/Ruby topics
• Largely Will Sobel, some Armando, 1 guest
• Rapid bootstrapping vs. understanding theory
• Rails easy/useful even if dont understand it
• Concepts supplemented by lab exercises
• Hack sessions supervised lab sessions
• Primarily for project work
• Students mostly develop on own laptops
• Deploy to production ISP (RAD Lab cluster)

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Real World Practices

• Development vs. deployment environments tools
• Real version control (Subversion)
• Automated deployment tools
• Regression testing techniques
• Database schema migration
• Use cases CRC cards (Class/ Responsibility/Colla
  borator poor mans UML) specify use cases and
  inter-component collaboration
• Checkpoints (releases) forced feature trimming

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Selected Projects...

• WeJoinIn (real users!) staff your volunteer
  events
• Calentopia organize your academic life
• 5um (next generation forum used as bug board by
  developers) organize stay on top of all the
  forums you read
• Lookbook share your fashion photos
• JamNet GarageBand goes online
• Telebears 2.0 better course searching
  registration
• MusicTree share your playlists
• Thing on Rails a collaborative work portal
• Mmmusic a community around music tracks

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Lessons/Surprises

• Gaps in tool sophistication
• Before Unixmake, rcs, gdb, emacs, ssh Today
  Win32IDE
• Limited conceptual understanding of
  edit/compile/run/test/ checkin cycle
• Made already-complex deployment configuration
  even worse
• Gaps in programming knowledge despite CS61A
• Review Higher-order functions, OOP, list-level
  parallelism (map/reduce), message passing, other
  programming concepts
• Gave tutorial on topics introduced later or not
  at all
• UI development, M/V/C, relational store,
  client/server arch.
• testing (regression/functional/integration),
  branched development
• Opportunity combine sound pedagogy with real
  world skills gratification of crafting a
  useful artifact early in your CS career.

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Future Plans

• Restructure syllabus for Fall 07,Sp 08 offering
• Mirror homeworks in CS61A to reinforce concepts
  show how used in practice (h.o. functions, etc.)
• Controversial dont introduce relational
  storage?
• Hire 2-4 students to work as RAD Lab interns
• Senior students help novices, staff lab, etc
  next fall
• Telebears2, Calentopia to be continued Fall07
• Other RoR apps/work to be done?

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Summer short course?

• Probably August probably Will Armando, poss.
  w/help from students
• Proposed format
• Morning narrated, hands-on, fast intro to
  RoRWalk thru prefab app(s), add some
  featuresTour of base libraries, plug-ins, etc.
• Afternoon app improvAudience suggests app to
  build on-demand
• Tonight? Rails, the Movie
• part I, 15 min. part II, 5 min.

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Conclusion Well-received First Offering

• Thanks to all who helped out
• Michael Armbrust for being unpaid TA
• Peter Bodik for help with project checkpoints
• Jon Kuroda, Mike Howard for setting up RAD Lab
  ISP hosting for projects
• Jimmy Kittyachavit for guest lectures
• CS 98/198 students for being guinea pigs
• Recommendation spend an hour learning how to
  think RoR