In System Design and Analysis, IT 380, it customary for a company to give the class a project that the company will actually be implementing in the near future. For our project, General Mills assigned a recipe management system.

This system is responsible for taking recipe submissions and taking those submissions through an approval process. New ingredients must first be approved before the recipe they are attached to can be approved. The general flow of the system is pretty simple.

Technology:

• Java, JSP’s
• Apache Tomcat
• MySQL
• Linux (Ubuntu)

We are close to wrapping up the project, with our presentation on Friday morning. We are close to having a functional submission process. Now, we need to work on the approval process and continue work on the user home pages.

If you see any errors, please let me know.

This is probably not a surprising concept. Changing requirements is a regular occurrence for real-world developers (or so I hear). If this is the case, why don’t more professors create assignments that model the real-world? Make an assignment that becomes 2 or more assignments. Make the students have to maintain their own code, or (even better) maintain the code of another student. Have them build the solution of each new problem from their solution to the last problem.

I guess this might be outside of the scope of many programming classes. College isn’t trying to train us for our first “real” job, it tries to “make us more well-rounded individuals and teach us to think critically.” But if I were to create the curriculum for a college programming course, I’d like to think I could create assignments that more closely model the real-world than several unrelated assignments  scattered through the semester. Or perhaps this all really is nonsense.

Perhaps I will try to get involved in this. I have had a voice in the back of my head that I should give back to the Ubuntu community. This might be a great time to start.

Here is the code:

echo "Syncing ~/docs"
rsync -ave ssh local/folder user@:host:remote/folder

This is pretty much the entirety. I just choose a few different folders by listing those two lines a couple of times. I am sure there is a better way to do this, but it’s working for me.

I think it is a really good idea to have a backup plan figured out, because you never know when a hard drive is going to fail.

I have meant to write up a list a few times in the past but never end up writing it down. Here are a few books that I have seen called must-haves:

• Code Complete
• Mythical Man-Month
• Pragmatic Programmer
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Knuth’s books

What books should I add or take away?