This week in Software Engineering, we started working on the first phase of the project for the remainder of the semester. For our project, we’re displaying information about Congress, including the current House of Representatives and Senate members, the Committees these members are in, and recent Bills that have been passed. Hopefully this would be useful in giving everyone a clearer sense of some of the activity happening in our government.

So far, on the website side, we’ve created the front page and navigation, but there is still much to go with displaying the tables of information and pages tied to each person, committee, and bill. Some work has also been done on creating the Rackspace server and defining the data models.Right now, we still have to create unit tests for the models, document our own RESTful API, and set-up the website on the server. Although we only have a portion of the project done, it seems feasible to finish with a team of five people.

For the tip of the week, I would encourage everyone to watch some of the videos from the Grace Hopper Conference this past week. The videos of the keynotes and plenaries for each of the three days can be found here. Although all of them were great, I particularly enjoyed the interview with Sheryl Sandberg and the tech talk on cooperative autonomous robots given by Manuela Veloso, a professor at Carnegie Mellon. The presentations for the rest of the sessions should be posted shortly, and I’ll link to those when they are up. Overall, I had a great experience at the conference and would encourage everyone, regardless of gender, to attend future conferences.