Project Journal

Week 1 (May 22 - May 26)

Dr. Kim and Tianyi were at ICSE 2017 this week, so I was able to get to know Westwood and UCLA. I met Dr. Kim's other grad students, Gulzar and Shaghayegh, who got me settled into the CS lab.

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Week 2 (May 29 - June 2)

I met Dr. Kim and Tianyi this week, and we discussed the long-term goals of my project this summer. Ideally, I could develop the UI and then we could do some human tests and write that into a paper.

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Week 3 (June 5 - June 9)

This week I made some real progress in my UI mockup; I'm almost done with hardcoding the prototype and then we can see about hooking it up to Maple on a server! However, right now I'm stuck on the trickiest part (in my opinion so far), which is to make the dialog popup show multiple solutions by letting a user see different "pages" of the dialog.

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Week 4 (June 12 - June 16)

This week was pretty frustrating. I spent all of it trying to get pagination to work, to no avail. I switched libraries several times and tried every possible combination of the jQuery UI Dialog/Bootstrap popover with "Sweet Pages"/Bootstrap pagination.

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Week 5 (June 26 - June 30)

I felt so productive this week because I got to leave the JavaScript/CSS libraries behind and do some honest-to-goodness coding. While libraries can be helpful in the long run, so much time seems to be spent learning how to use and configure them, while I feel more comfortable with the process of just coding, testing, and debugging.

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Week 6 (July 3 - July 7)

I finished as much as I could of the voting buttons this week, so now a user can click an upvote/downvote button on a solution in the popup and the button will send its ID to the server, and then disable itself so a user can only send one upvote/downvote per solution. In the database, I added a new column for each pattern that will tally its votes, and I made a Java method to add new votes to the database.

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Week 7 (July 10 - July 14)

We made a lot of progress this week, but we encountered some obstacles which means we didn't get as far as we had planned a week ago. First of all, we had another video meeting with Dr. Hartmann and Elena, and among the things we discussed was the idea to synthesize code examples for the popup by stitching together different GitHub examples following the same abstract pattern. So that is what Tianyi decided to tackle this week, while I continued work on the UI itself.

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Week 8 (July 17 - July 21)

I feel like I accomplished a lot this week; Tianyi and I feel very close to finishing a good prototype of the UI. And, my JavaScript skills are already so much better than they were last week!

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Week 9 (July 24 - July 28)

I started my penultimate week of this program exploring Boa, a backend tool that Maple uses as part of its GitHub mining. It's been really great to be able to learn about how the backend works, even though I'm not specifically working on that; Tianyi has been helpful with explanations and pointing me to various resources, since he wants me to be able to understand how our whole project works, not just the parts that I've been working on.

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Week 10 (July 31 - August 4)

I figured out how to highlight the entire method in GitHub, by implementing the stack solution I had thought of last week.

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