alexeyza / startup-programming

Startup Programming course at the University of Victoria

Department of Computer Science - University of Victoria

CSC 485E + SENG 480B, 2016, Fall Semester

This course aims to give students the tools and skills to rapidly develop and transform innovative ideas (of their own choosing) into working projects utilizing advanced mobile, social, cloud, and web technologies. In particular, students will experience the style of development activity that is common in a new startup company. The project based course will be augmented by a series of lectures to accelerate learning with new web technologies, product design, agile development practices, user interface design, and project management. During the term, students will work in teams of 5 students. Each team will be closely mentored by several staff members (including the instructors and one or more members from industry). Students will gain valuable technical skills and experience working in small teams, while facing real-world challenges that include a tight schedule, hard deadlines, and self directed learning.

Projects will include designing and developing a live web system. Each team will also maintain a web page with project documentation and design documents.

See course requirements and student testimonials.

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Classes will be on Fridays 1:30-4:20 at HHB 110:
(Tentative schedule, slides are in the resources section)

	Date	Meeting agenda
1	09/09/2016	Introduction (Alexey), How to build a software product, Standing on the shoulders of giants, Demo of past projects (guest: Carlene Lebeuf), Forming teams
2	16/09/2016	Startup Slam invitation (Noah Warder), Web development overview (Alexey), Mobile development overview (Greg), UI/UX - Design Thinking (Peggy)
3	23/09/2016	Git, GitHub, and Working Together (Ian), Project proposal presentations
4	30/09/2016	Guest talks:  · So you want to build a thing by Jason Trill (Director of Engineering at Flow, previously was at Metalab),  · Will Fraser (CEO and Co-Founder of Referral SaaSquatch)
5	14/10/2016	Milestone 1 presentation - Proof Of Concept
6	21/10/2016	· Software Management for people who just want to get stuff done (Cliff),  · Benevity guest talk by Jim Olson (product design at Benevity) and Jon Wiggens (UI Designer at Benevity, previously at EA),  · Dev Ops - 12 factor apps (Cliff)
7	28/10/2016	· Testing for web developers by Clarke Brunsdon (CEO and Co-founder of Stembolt)  · Startup accelerators Q&A by Brad Van Vugt (Co-founder of SendWithUs and YC alum) and Leif Baradoy (CEO and Co-founder of Giftbit and Techstars Alum)  · UI/UX - thinking about the user (Peggy)
8	04/11/2016	Milestone 2 presentation - Release Candidate
9	02/12/2016	Milestone 3 presentation - Public live BETA (note: time and location of this meeting may change)
	19/12/2016	Final submission (by email, no meeting)

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Mentoring Staff:

• Alexey Zagalsky
• Margaret-Anne Storey
• Cliff McCollum
• Ian Bull
• Gregory Schier
• Eirini Kalliamvakou (Teaching Assistant)

Alumni mentors: Arie van Deursen

Teams and Projects:
View current and past [teams and projects](teams and projects.md).

Reception Hour: By appointment. Friday 11:00am-12:00pm at ECS 617 (please send an email to set a meeting)

Contact email: [email protected]

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This doesn't include the students' projects, which are hosted on separate repositories and each have their own license.

Intellectual Property Ownership

Students are asked to consult with the project participant agreement. UVic will agree to waive its interest in such IP under the following conditions:

1. A class list and list of associated projects (contained with the attached Project Participant Agreement) is provided to ORS (via RPKM) within 1 month of the start date of the course, and
2. That the students make their IP developed during the course freely available to other students taking the course for learning purpose only for the duration of the course
3. Each student participating signs the attached “Project Participation Agreement” (PPA) where they acknowledge they will not use any faculty IP/University owned IP in their project.

startup-programming's Issues

Replace all contact email links to a unified email address

Replace all email contact links with a unified one, that would be used by all staff members.

Due date for milestone 2 should be 04/11/2016

Change the due date in the "milestone 2 - release candidate.md" file to 04/11/2016. The README shows the correct date.

Re-populate the resources

Re-populate the resources content:

1. Start with content from previous semester.
2. Filter dead or obsolete links.
3. Update and add new resources.

Some UI issues I encountered

I had a chance to try out the app. I seemed to work well, and looks very responsive. It was also very easy to install, which is why you can benefit from feedback.
I understand that you are still working on it, and some of the data is for testing purposes.

Here are some UI issues I encountered:

1. It's impossible to quit the app. The back button doesn't work, and the "logout" option in the menu doesn't log me out either.

2. When I entered the app, it correctly recognized I'm in Victoria (awesome!), but at the top it still asks me "which city are you interested in?" - perhaps it would be better to show the "Explore Victoria" at the top?
   

3. I think it's good that you allow users to see the identified location. Do you think it takes a bit too much screen space?
   

4. When clicking on a trip, it shows me the details. But the big red button, is not "add to my trips", but instead it is "Map". I actually had to look hard in order to find the "add to my list" button.
   
   I do love the "Stack Overflow" ranking arrows, and the star scoring - I think users will be able to quickly understand how to use these. Maybe the "add comment" and "show comments" could be clearer (an icon perhaps?). Some user testing may help.

5. There doesn't seem to be a way to remove trips from my list. But restarting the app, has automatically removed my saved trips (not sure you intended it to happen).

6. When I clicked on "view places", it shows me the following screen with "Add" button, but I have no idea to where I'll be adding this place to.
   

7. I think the "places: 0 and Seeds: 0" is useful. Perhaps it shouldn't be in the menu, but as part of the main screen? What do you think?
   

Update dates

Update dates for meetings and for milestones.

Clean up and improve the "Resources" page

Would be great to improve this page:

• Remove old/non-working/obsolete links
• Improve the order of the categories (bring some of the more needed categories higher)
• Improve some categories (the screen recording page can be update with newer tools like OBS

mongohq on heroku - can't find free tier

Thanks for the great note, but I have a small issue.

If I enter

heroku addons:add mongohq

I get:

Creating mongohq on ⬢ appIDDDD... $18/month
Created mongohq-reticulated-30930 as MONGOHQ_URL

I have entered my billing info into Heroku. My issue is that I can't find (on heroku's website or elsewhere) how to use a free tiered version of mongohq add on. Could it be that:

• it does not exist anymore
• it does not exist in my geography?

Sidenote, this link is dead: http://www.elliotbradbury.com/use-mongohq-heroku-without-verifying-account/.

Update Javascript links

Update links for learning JavaScript. Most of the current ones are a bit old.

Update names of staff members

Update the names of staff members on all the pages (some pages display the names of previous staff members).

Modals

Modals as a mai mechanizm to direct logging session (during twitter outh process)