WattDepot Client

I recently worked with a partner on a project called WattDepot-cli. Our objective was to creative a command line client that could process certain instructions and gather information based on the simulated data from WattDepot. I learned a lot from this project in terms of working with another person and how a long term project functions.

The first thing we did was look at continuous integration software. Hudson was created to help users steadily update their projects in order for the project to grow and be configured in an efficient manner. I have detailed the use of it in my previous blog. It's worth a look for those who appreciate speedy updates. Link

A second threshold to cross was learning the basics for WattDepot. It's a sort of stepping stone toward creating a smart grid for electric companies. WattDepot functions as monitoring software that gathers information on how much a certain power plant generates in a certain period of time.

The initial learning curve was pretty steep. What was difficult to understand was the way WattDepot worked. What helped was using the wiki on the project site. It was very informative on how to do what I need to do. Link
For example, one of the commands had to calculate the total emissions of carbon emitted per day. I had closely look at the all the methods in the WattDepot Client to really understand what I had to do. My partner Edwin was responsible for the list sources, list source summary, list sensor data {day}, and list sensor data {timestamp} commands. I was responsible for the remaining ones power generated {day}, power generated {timestamp}, chart {source}, and list total. Yeah, that list is really ugly so please check out the wiki site because it is very helpful.

I have to say that Hudson wasn't very help in the very beginning. It actually slowed us down at the start. We hadn't divided up the work yet and my partner and I were both waiting for each other to update. This miss-communication wasted a lot of time. But once we got going in a good rhythm the updates to Hudson was very useful because we had certain parts to work on and they didn't interfere with each other so there was no integration problems. We used subversion strictly to update our own commands to put the whole command line program together.

Because we wasted a lot of the time, our program is not of the highest quality. We also suffered from a lack of communication. Like I have said, the first few days were into the project was pretty quiet. Not to mention we made one of the greatest errors, not exchanging cell phone numbers. In the modern age it doesn't matter what type of bandwidth you have, cellphones still beats email.