E01: Principles ans Practices, Project Management

This week is about principes and practices of the program and about project management in general. A final project has to be sketched and planed. The project needs to be sketched on a website.


Setting up the environment

One of this weeks assignment is to set up a personal website – and here it is.
I did not want to use a WYSIWG editor for creating the website. So I tried two different products ATOM and Brackets.
We also have to train ourselves in using GIT.
Finally, we should plan our project.

Chose an editor

After testing booth I decided to go with Brackets. Some reasons are:

Frameworks for the website

While I am a computer scientist and not a skilled designer I decided to use a framework for the basic layout of my page.
First, I tried an open source. There are lots of free templates available. Everyone can choose one to use this as a basis to get nice results immediately. During the FabAcademy program you might need to adapt the template and by doing so, learn more about HTML, etc.

First, I used a template of © 2013 Ivan Designostrom, powered by Type & Grids

The second framework I tried is the Fab Academy Template by Massimo Menichinelli
It is based on Twitter Bootstrap+JQuery+google-code-prettify+GitHub theme for google-code-prettify+JSC3D+jquery.ganttView.

HTML & CSS

While using a framework, such as the one mentioned, you may want to change the look and feel of your design. I recommend to add a custom.css file in the sub directory of 'bootstrap/css/' and to add your custom styles. However, you then have to add this line of code to each html file, you want to customize. Important is the consideration of sequence. Your custom settings must appear after the standard-css-styles.
<!-- Custom styles for this template -->
< href="media/fabacademy.css" rel="stylesheet">
< href="bootstrap/css/custom.css" rel="stylesheet">

There are varoius good tutorials in the web, about css and bootstrap. One, I want to recommend is the one of W3Schools.

Special characters in HTML can be found here.

Git

Neil has created a "Git notes" dokument. This can be found here.

Tips & Tricks

GIT: Global ignore of .DS_Store
Since I am using a Mac and spotlight saves .DS_Store in each folder, I don't want git to commit these files. So I made it a global rule. First, make a global .gitignore file somewhere, e.g. echo .DS_Store > ~/.gitignore_global.
Now make it global for all repositories git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global.

Your .gitignore_global file should look like this:
# Ignore Mac DS_Store files .DS_Store
Before commit, check file sizes
du -sk * | sort -n


Project Plan

Plan A: Initially I started with the idea of building a bike from scratch (chassis, shell body, e-components, etc.). But after listing all necessary activities I came to decide that this is hardly possible. Of course, all procedures being taught could be applied but not in the given time. In order to deal with the core – which is the intelligent control of the motor - I need a bike. By looking at my list it became apparent that this would take too much time for being ready to start with electronics.
Thus, I changed my plan: PLAN B!
FINALLY, I changed my mind again.
At the end I decided to MAKE a *NEW* Final Project: FabKickBoard - a motorized Kickboard


And I did :)



fabKickBoard - FabAcademy 2016 Final Project by Karsten Nebe from usableDesign on Vimeo.