For those of you who don’t know, this past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I’ve had my face planted into a laptop, working 8 hour days on the OLM project.  

And I wasn’t alone.

I was in a room with plenty of other Computer Science students – some even coming from as far as the West coast to join us. Good people, good times, interesting problems, and free food – all care of Greg Wilson, Karen Reid, and the other support within the department.  It was really fun, and I learned a lot.

And we coded our asses off.  Literally.  It was awesome.

So what did I end up actually doing?  Well, when TA’s are marking code, there are little menus that let them attach pre-built annotations to highlighted sections of code.  I’ve also replaced the ugly Javascript Prompt dialog that asks for new annotations with a nice, modal dialog, using LivePipe UI.  The team also got the rubric listed next to the code, and we now have the ability to apply grades on the rubric!  Awesome!  We’re almost there!  There are plenty of tickets, plenty of ways this code and interface can get cleaned up, but we almost have the behaviour we want.  And that’s something.

If I get a chance, there are two things I’d like to do:

1. Replace the SyntaxHighlighter Javascript code with something a little less client-heavy.  Maybe we can syntax highlight the code on the server side before we send it to the client for viewing?  That doesn’t sound too bad… does anybody know of a Ruby gem that’ll do that?
2. Refactor the annotations code.  Right now, it’s a lot of Javascript.  A lot.  I’d like to shave it down, simplify it, streamline it.  But that’s what refactoring is all about, right?

Oh, and, in other news, I’m considering graduate school, and doing Google Summer of Code.  Just something I’m mulling over in my head…

Update:  Coding for three days straight brought sooooo much tension back into my shoulders…this is where Movement class exercises become very handy…