Day 23

Today

• Taking your projects public
• Individual portfolios

For Next time

• Prepare for Architectural Review 2 next class, submit framing document
• Continue project work

Individual Portfolios

One of the great things about Olin classes is that you are continually building projects that demonstrate your creativity and talent as an engineer. In SoftDes alone, your work on MP3, MP4, and the Final Project (at least) fall into this category.

I’m sure you’d love to have a curated collection of that work by the time you graduate, but sometimes we don’t take the time to actually make that happen. Today (and in the previous Reading Journal), we’ll work on capturing and presenting your work by writing up a short summary that could be published as part of an online portfolio. We’ll also give you some tools to actually implement the portfolio once you’re ready.

Exercise:

Olin’s Office of Post-Graduate Planning recently hosted an alumni session on portfolio creation.

Individually: Look through the PGP portfolio workshop slides (PDF) up through the “Storytelling” section. Then choose 2-3 examples from the PGP list of sample portfolios (PDF) and study the examples they have for class projects.

In small groups: Discuss the portfolio entries that told a compelling story. What made them interesting to you? What features did they share? How would they connect with various audiences? At the boards, create a list of guidelines to emulate when creating your own portfolio entries.

Note: The visual appearance and formatting of your personal website/portfolio is an important consideration, but NOT something we’re thinking about today. Focus on content for now - there will be plenty of time later to play with themes to your heart’s content.

Making SoftDes projects part of your GitHub portfolio

One part of making your work discoverable is to have it as part of your GitHub profile. Your mini-project work is currently under the SoftDes organization and private. Once it’s ready, you may want it to be under your personal GitHub account and public.

We have some suggested prerequisites for making your work public:

• “Good code” - you’ve addressed feedback from course staff, reviewed and revised your work, and possibly completed a code review with peers or course staff to put your best foot forward
• No secrets or other inappropriate content in the repo
• Solid title, description, and README (see the current Reading Journal)

Once you feel like you’re ready, and you’ve discussed it with your team, we can help you flip the switch and share your work with the world!

Creating a personal website using GitHub

One platform you can use to create a personal website (including a portfolio) is GitHub. You will be doing exactly this to create a SoftDes final project website with your team, so this is good practice

Pros of GitHub Page:

• Quick and easy to create
• Free
• Markdown - don’t need to write HTML if you don’t want to, but it’s there if you do
• Discoverable by being connected to your GitHub account, plus you can use a custom domain if/when you’re ready
• Easy to link to existing project work on GitHub

Cons:

• Not WYSIWYG - must use or develop your own themes/styles
• Static pages only, will not do server-side stuff (like Flask)
• You may have feelings about GitHub as a company, but site itself is fairly portable (just a git repository with Markdown/HTML that you could host elsewhere)

If you’re ready to try it out, check out Getting Started with GitHub Pages. Course staff can help you out with the process.

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Preparing for Architectural Review 2

For AR2, you can assume the other teams are already familiar with your project idea, so you can spend less time on introduction and more time going in depth on issues specific to your project.

As before, it’s up to you to plan and lead the session and how you use the time is up to your team. Consult the Architectural Review page and talk to course staff to get ideas appropriate to where you are in the project arc.

Tips for success:

• Use the lessons learned from your AR1 reflection and feedback from course staff to make AR2 stronger
• Come prepared. You don’t need pretty slides, but you almost certainly will need to show some visuals (e.g. system architecture, preliminary work, question prompts)
• Have a clear agenda for what you want to get out of the session and how you will use your time, and communicate it clearly to the rest of the class
• Provide clear instructions during the session. Your peers want to help but need direction on what to do, particularly if there are competing alternatives (e.g. listen to your presentation vs. fill out a feedback form)
• Consider alternative interaction formats (e.g. small group break-outs vs full-class discussion). Use full-class Q&A sparingly. Unscripted/free flowing question time is generally not the most effective way to use your time, especially since you only hear one voice at a time.
• Design a thoughtful feedback form. Some questions are better to discuss and others are better to take offline and individually. We strongly recommend including a name field, so that you can follow up as needed
• Consider providing background materials. If you need detailed assistance from peers it’s ok to provide contextual readings ahead of time. Check out the AR page for guidelines.

As before, you must submit your preparation and framing document (including link to survey, visuals/slides, and any background readings) ahead of time.