OpenMRS SoC - 2nd week update

Hi Everyone,

Its second week already and feels like the time is flying to reach mid term! My mentor Saptarshi advised me to develop a simple End to End working system as the time to mid term so I could improve upon after that to final.

This week I have successfully embedded an Xform into my module. And the intend of this embedding is to enable care providers to customize Xform any time to fit their needs and edit question fields, And I have a plan to create an Android App based on ODK Clinic so the care seeker's will able to fill patient narratives with their Mobile devices too! Xforms are a great Form type to cater all of these requirements.

Currently the User interface looks like below, I have studied about Google recaptcha api and added it to this new UI and server side coding. (actually it wasn't that much hard as i thought) And ready to start work on the Care provider console next week.





"Story of the Floss" -- About a great phrase commonly use in open source software development.



Yesterday at the discussion with my mentor Saptarshi, he mentioned a really nice phrase called "Story of the Floss" I studied more about it. Its a really great phrase and can learn lots of thing from it.

Simply it means: Keep it simple, Build an End to End solution, Most importantly take action(code) without thinking/talking too much and adding more and more fancy ideas into the problem.

Here's the related story. (Reference: https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/The+Story+of+the+Floss)


Clem and another group are faced with the same challenge: build a bridge across a canyon.

The other group — like most of us would — gathers engineers, draws up specifications, and begins planning on how the bridge should be constructed properly.  Meanwhile, Clem pulls a box of dental floss out of his pocket, unwinds it, and throws it across the canyon. Almost immediately, he's got something across the canyon. It's only floss, but it's there — end to end.

The other group is arguing about whether the bridge should be a beam, suspension, truss, or arch bridge.  Clem starts layering paper mâché onto the floss.

The other group has finally decided on a suspension bridge and begins preparing the materials according to specifications.  Clem has people walking across his paper mâché bridge.

The other group realizes that they would probably be better off with a truss bridge, begins discussions on the new specifications, and then realizes that they are too far over budget and the project is shut down.  Clem has people driving across his bridge.

The other group finally creates their version of the bridge, only to realize it doesn't reach over to the other side where they initially intended it to!


The Lesson

Whenever possible, start with the floss. See the solution through end-to-end, since this is often the best way to understand the problem and often informs the next pass at the solution. In the end, it is rare that we fully understand the problem until the third iteration of the solution.
Be agile, open to corrections, and iterate on your solutions. But, most importantly, take action.
  

My Thoughts

In my words the lesson of this story is dont try to be so smart and keep expanding the idea of your project. Just start simply from sctratch and add lil by lil, But the goal should be to develop an end to end solution (that means a product which is something useful and usable in a practical scenario.) After getting accomplish the basic goals of the project you can proceed into your other fancy ideas. Note that those fancy ideas could take a longer time to develop (or might get failed) but if you have followed the floss way, you still have a basic product which is really a usable one!

Actually I think this phrase isn't only related to the open source software development, This is a truly awesome phrase which we can adopt in our life in general!


OpenMRS SoC - 1st week update


Hello Everone!

GSoC coding period has just started (June 18th) and I am really excited about it, I am going to speed up my coding for the project in the coming few days! As an open source freak I really like to keep my repo clean and nice! So I have integreted my github repo with Travis CI, Cool heh > So anytime i push code to repo. travis willl build and tell if the build is okay or failing.. xD cool huh. Notice the Green label in my repo snap below. :-)




Since travis isnt provide any build artifacts to the outsiders, I am going to implement a Jenkins on a free OpenShift server So  i can link it to my github repo displaying as "nightly builds" :-)

Watch out this space for more interesting things on the coming days with OpenMRS GSoC!

Until next time hack-on!
-Harsha