So, my first project here is going to be a simple web-based app to manage students’ grades here at the Cultural College. The school isn’t that big (two thousand students, maybe?) and the grade calculations are just an average weighted by course credit, but it must have taken them forever to do it all out by hand every semester.
Our first design meeting was a bit tedious, with me trying to explain use cases and them trying to explain class divisions (neither of which are in the dictionary) using more common Vietnamese terms. Despite all that, the data model is done. And the administrators I work with are duly impressed that someone who can’t read the local paper has no trouble normalizing a data model.
I’ll be using open-source software wherever possible, though the whole thing will be running on windows machines. One of the guys I’m working with, Thao, mentioned that there was a high level debate about whether the government should embrace open source wholeheartedly, but he carefully changed the subject when I tried to engage him further. In general, I’ve definitely noticed that politics are off limits in conversation, and I’m going to be careful not to make anyone uncomfortable, at least until I have a better feel for what situations will allow me to broach the subject.
For the geeks, details: Probably mySQL-Apache-PHP, simple code to glue them together. If anyone can suggest a simple framework or data access components of some sort to get data out of the database, please comment or drop me a message.