You are required to document all of your work in this course using an online journal (or blog). Additionally, you are expected to post all of your code for the semester to GitHub.
You are expected to keep an online journal of your progress throughout this class. Your instructor will read this journal to see how you are progressing, so you should update your journal regularly over the course of the semester. At a minimum, you are expected to create a post for each Assignment and each major Project. You are also exptected to summarize any insights you have in each week’s work, to discuss to the readings, and to document your production projects and technical research thoroughly.
Expectations
This online journal is a place for you to record your experience and overall progress in the course. You should document not only your successes but also any challenges, experiments or meanderings. This online journal is also the primary way you will submit your work in this class.
Your online journal is not a portfolio! You may have a personal portfolio already (if not, you should be thinking seriously about this!), your online journal is distinctly different from a portfolio, but is a valuable additional record of your work. The journal should contain your notes, ideas, references, and so on. Focus on the process.
If you use your blog for other classes or content (which I highly encourage), you must have a dedicated category for this course.
Good documentation habits
In this course, the majority of your posts will be written summaries of what you have built. You should supplement this written content with screenshots and system diagrams.
Document your projects thoroughly as you go, don’t put it off until the end. You can begin a post and continue to edit and add content to that post as the project progresses.
Make sure any code you post is well-commented, so you and others can understand what it does. Don’t overload your notes with code!! Code repositories like GitHub are best for sharing code, rather than blogs, so post your code to a repository and link to it from your blog. GitHub Gist is an ideal way to share code on your blog.
Cite your sources
Make sure to cite the sources where you get ideas, code, circuits, and construction techniques. When you base your work on someone else’s, cite the original author and link to their work, just as you would when quoting another author in a paper. If you only changed one part of an existing program, post only the part you changed, and link to the original. Copying code or techniques without attribution is plagiarism. Few ideas come out of the blue, and your readers can learn a lot from the sources from which you learned and by which you were were inspired. So be generous in sharing your sources.
Remember, your journal lives on the internet, so use hyperlinks generously throughout your posts!!
Resources / Suggestions
👉 I highly recommend using Wordpress.com for your online journal - it is free and offers the cleanest layouts of any free blogging platform. It is also platform that you can continue to build on in the future.
👉 GitHub Gist is an ideal way to share code on your blog.
👉 Use Vimeo to embedding videos in your posts.
👉 Photos and videos should be taken in landscape orientation.