UCOSP: That's Me in the Middle

Andrew Louis has posted a great summary of the Fall 2010 UCOSP code sprint, which took place this past weekend here in Toronto. Over 50 students and mentors from all across the country spent two and a half days talking, coding, learning, laughing (sometimes at me), and getting to know the city and each other. This term’s projects include:

• POSIT (an Android app for disaster relief workers),
• The geospatial components for INGRES,
• a mail relay and archive module for Pinax,
• Freeseer (a tool for capturing video presentations),
• fab4browser (for annotating web pages),
• ReviewBoard (an open source code review tool),
• MarkUs (an online grading application), and
• the Technology Explorer for IBM DB2.

Andrew, Karen, Michelle, and Eleni did a great job of pulling everything together, and I enjoyed meeting the two students from Waterloo who have joined the team I’m working with, but it did feel kind of weird to be a bystander instead of in the thick of things. On the plus side, it was very cool to have an ex-student explain to me (very politely) why I’m wrong to insist that unit tests must always stay off-disk. Maybe the best way to summarize the overall goal of UCOSP is to say that we’re trying to turn students into peers; here’s hoping many more come back to correct me in future :-).