tl;dr; Students will be asked to share a series of discoveries (code samples, articles, libraries, etc) that will benefit the group. Students will prepare at least 5 discoveries over the course of the semester.

Documenting Discoveries

Throughout the course, you are encouraged to go beyond the course materials and uncover new ideas and techniques related to web programming. To incentivize this self-directed exploration, it is a graded component of this course.

To receive this grade you are to regularly research and report technical solutions, approaches and examples that are relevant to the course or a project that’s been assigned.

The example should be one of the following (unless otherwise instructed):

• a gem, library or extension that could be used in a project for the course;
• a technical tutorial that provides guidance on implementing some aspect of web services;
• articles or best practice that provides guidance on designing zero-UI, chat bots or similar solutions;
• a research paper or underlying technology that relates to the course topics;
• code samples that illustrate a solution, workflow or technical strategy.

Simply put, find and report resources that will help you make better web applications as part of this course.

Learning Objective

As part of the exercise, students will:

• build familiarity with projects that are relevant to the course and to web application development with Ruby and Sinatra;
• identify and critically review gems, extensions and technical solutions that relate to the course;
• help co-create a set of exemplars to draw on as part of their own creative projects;
• increase their ability to describe and implement technical solutions for lightweight projects.

Deliverables:

Add your documented example to the #discoveries as a new post on slack (see below). The discovery should include a link to the resource, it’s creators, and a short narrative (100-200 words explaining why someone else should pay attention to it)

A template and suggested questions is provided to help guide your documentation below.

Grading

You receive 2% for each discovery, for a maximum of 10% credit (i.e. complete 5). Full details can be found in the Grading, Feedback and Policies section

Constraints

• No two students may submit the same work. Claim early.
• Avoid examples already in the Resources section of the course site or that are covered in class.

Starting points

To help guide your explorations, a list of potential places is below:

• Ruby Gems
• Awesome Ruby - a collection of great gems organized by function.
• Stackoverflow - a community forum containing solutions to all sorts of problems about programming
• GitHub hosts tonnes of ruby projects, gems and code samples

Note: This is by no means an exhaustive list. You should explore beyond these!

Submitting your work:

You’ll submit your precedents on Slack. Each discovery should be submitted separately.

To submit your work:

• Open Slack and navigate to the #discoveries channel
• In the text box (bottom), click the + on the left hand side. Choose the option to ‘Create a new post’
• In the post editor, the title should match the name of the project
• Add some text about your discovery. This should start with: a) link(s) to the project website b) a list of original creators/artists, c) relevant images or embed videos (see below).
• When you have added your post, click the Share button on the top right.

Template and documentation

In each post, embed a video and/or images of the project, and write a short critical reflection on the project (about 100-200 words) in which you cover the following:

1. Overview: Briefly describe the project (a couple of sentences) and who made it.
2. Discovery: Describe why did you select it, what did you learn, why is it interesting to you?
3. Relevance: Describe why you believe someone should pay attention to it
4. Application: Finally, give some examples of howyou might use it in your project or what it might be used to do.

Remember: Create a separate post for each example.