Eclipse WTP – Continuity Beyond a Course

The semester has finally come to an end. It’s interesting to note that two students, Davoud and Tahereh, have created a wiki page to reflect what the whole class has accomplished over a period of 14 weeks.They did it during their examination week.

I was inspired by a blog posting written by John Selmys, another professor at Seneca College. He was inviting all the ISA graduates to join the Fedora community. This makes me wonder: Now the course is over. How may our little Eclipse WTP student group @ Seneca develop continuity beyond a course structure? Any ideas?

Eclipse WTP – Exciting News!

The Winter semester is going to end within 2 weeks. A few weeks ago, I was wondering how much progress the students could make. I just cannot believe what has happened over this weekend. On March 26(Thursday), Jordan emailed everyone to do COLLABORATIVE work on FIXING 3 WTP bugs. Three students have tried very hard to resolve these bugs on their own. Last Tuesday Chris Tyler, a professor at Seneca College, shared with our class what the Fedora community had experienced regarding effective online communication in an open source community. In the end, he told us the true spirit of open source development: “Just Do It.” Jordan also encouraged everyone to focus on tackling the TECHNICAL aspect of fixing the WTP bugs. His famous motto for our class: “Where there is a will, there is a way.”

I was reading Le Yang’s blog postings this weekend. He offered solutions for fixing Kevin vu’s bug(#240698) and Shelley/Xia’s bug(#137822). Bear in mind that Le never got any feedback on his own bug from the WTP community(via webtools newsgroup and Bugzilla). Yet he was the one who had helped his two fellow classmates to FIX their bugs. I am very excited to see the positive impact of team work. The story did not end here, however.

I noticed that Nabeel’s bug(#227760) was also related to the server tools. I sent an email to four of them and Jordan as well. Nabeel found out that he could also use Le’s solution to fix the bug. Now I’m waiting to see when they will create the patches and get feedback from the WTP developers who are in charge of these bugs.

I usually do not want to boast about something or someone. This time, may I say this: “Seneca STUDENTS can FIX WTP Bugs.” They can do it if they collaborate and receive mentoring from a professor like Jordan and professional WTP developers such as Larry Isaacs, David Williams, Konstantin Komissarchik, Mark Hutchinson, Valentin Baciu, Angel Vera, Lawrence Mandel, and so on. (Note: I do not have time to do a th0rough search on the webtools newsgroup and Bugzilla to come up with a complete list of people who have supported the students. Please be understanding.)