Onboarding (Summer, 2021)
Greetings Summer 2021 interns!
We're happy that you're joining us on the RadGrad team for Summer, 2021. We think this will be an exciting and fun summer for all of us.
If you take a look at the Summer 2021 Project Board, you'll see that we have dividing the summer tasks into four categories: Onboarding, Good First Issues, Good Second Issues, and General To Do. These categories are in order of increasing complexity: we think the best and fastest way to get you productive in this system is for all of you to start by going through all of the onboarding tasks. Then, we'll divide up the Good First Issues amongst you. Then, the Good Second Issues. After that, you should be able to handle the General To Dos.
The remainder of this page goes into a bit more detail on each of the onboarding tasks.
1. Review the documentation
The first thing to do as a new developer is to read through this entire site. You want to get a sense for the entire project. As you read, you will have questions. Please post your comments and questions as a comment to GitHub issue 465. We want to know what is confusing or unclear in our documentation so we can fix it. As a new developer, you are best suited to let us know when we didn't write clearly.
Please document your outcomes from this task as part of Issue 465.
2. Review the system from the user perspective
Next, please review the system from the perspective of a user.
Please login to https://radgrad2.ics.hawaii.edu. You should all have accounts.
Please try to address all high and medium priority To Do list items on your home page. As you do so, please make notes on what you found difficult to understand or accomplish.
Then, use the site and write an essay discussing your findings as detailed in Issue 464. Your essay has the potential to guide development priorities for the next several months, so please take care and do a good job!
3. Set up and review the RadGrad tech stack
Next, start to become familiar with the RadGrad tech stack, which is documented in the next section, Tech Stack. If you've had ICS 314 and/or ICS 414, then most of this tech stack should be at least a little familiar to you. If not, then depending on your background, you may have a few weeks of self-study before you are ready for actual RadGrad development. That's OK! Please don't cut corners and, for example, use your preferred editor rather than IntelliJ IDEA. We all understand that this is tremendously enticing, but it will only work against you in the end. We would rather have you be a little slower at the start while you are learning our tech stack, then to try to rush into things, because we've learned through experience that if we all use the same tools, we can help each other better, and we can make the tools work better than if we all go our own way. Once again, we expect you'll have questions as you work with our tech stack. Don't worry! Just post your questions to the #radgrad2-chat channel on the RadGrad discord server, and we'll help you out.
Please document your outcomes from this task as part of Issue 466.
4. Download and install RadGrad
The third thing to do is to download and install RadGrad locally, as documented in How to install RadGrad. As part of that, you will want to run the system, as documented in How to run start scripts. You also need to learn how to run the tests, as documented in Overview of RadGrad Testing.
Please document your outcomes from this task as part of Issue 467.
5. Review the research
Now that you've had some practical exposure to RadGrad as a software system, it's important to understand RadGrad as a research project. You'll read two papers and then write an essay discussing the results.
For more details, see Issue 501.
6. Build your personal sandbox
The final onboarding task is to gain experience building React components the "RadGrad Way". This task will get you familiar with the basics of the RadGrad system, its user interface, and internal processing.
For detailed instructions, please see Issue 468.