Robert Scoble’s interview with Steve Wozniak is worth watching if you’ve got an hour to kill. They talked a little about the Homebrew Computer Club, which was a little before my time, but it captured my imagination when I read about it in Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution back in high school. Computers, especially hardware, have gotten a little more complicated since then, but it struck me yesterday how the current “Camp” movement is probably the best approximation of the energy that must have been present in those days, and it’s exciting to think of what might come out of the new generation of meetups.
Not-so-coincidentally, I made it out to DemoCamp10 last night after missing several over the summer (paradoxically, my first DemoCamp was at the Radiant Core offices, which wasn’t exactly easy to find, but I couldn’t summon the motivation to look up No Regrets on the map). I’m sure that in the Homebrew days there must have been a few demos where the magic smoke was let out, and the tradition carried over last night. Still, there were a few solid presentations. I was particularly interested in the first one, an online grading and code review system (screencast here). I have no need to mark students’ work, but as ( I think) Greg Wilson pointed out, there are some applications for code review within a development team. My life as a former bank guy kicked in and I thought it’d be interesting to see some kind of financial application review process. Talking at our table, the consensus seemed to be that the left side of the app was solid for most uses, but the right side would be awesome if there was some kind of plugin architecture so various needs could be catered to. There’s a lot left to be done in the collaborative workspace, and the system I saw last night could fill a few of those holes.
Technorati Tags: DemoCamp
Andrey Petrov | 24-Oct-06 at 5:36 pm | Permalink
Hi Jason,
Glad you liked our (Online Marking) application. :-)
The right side (rubric table/criteria) is rather customizable — you can define your own criteria (categories), any number of qualities (values) with any given weights. Unfortunately, if you need anything beyond that, the structure is rather “hard coded” into the interface, but it wouldn’t be hard to rip it out and stick something of your own in — if you’re willing to write all the backend/frontend code for it.
This is a more-or-less Open Source project (though it is yet to be officially licensed as such). If you would like to contact Greg, I’m sure he’ll give you a link to the SVN repository and you can play around with it.
Thank you for your interest.
Jason | 24-Oct-06 at 8:35 pm | Permalink
I don’t have a need for it myself, but I’ve sent the link out to a few friends who work in areas where it might be useful.
I just watched the screencast again, and I’m really impressed by the simplicity of the application - when I suggest a web version of an existing paper process in some circles, there’s a lot of resistance to the change, and sometimes rightly so. Your app appears to actually address a problem without adding any more complexity to the situation. Nice work!