Welcome to Anthony's ramblings on making (and documenting) things

WIP

This site is big ol' work in progress territory but I hope it contains enough useful info to justify its soft release now with the promise that it'll be good eventually.

Purpose

I think the best learning is done ~1 on 1 or in very small groups. This has lots of positive side effects such as fostering stronger intra section communities but has the drawback of pulling from an immutable bucket of time. No matter how hard you work there are only 168 hours in the week so serial processes that hinge on the efforts of a small number of individuals slow processes down which results in our case in an unfortunate necessity to limit enrollment in this course. In an effort to reduce that I've started a series of guides to help supplement my own time and answer many of the frequently asked questions throughout this course. My response time on gitlab/email/cell is pretty quick but the search bar here doesn't sleep. I still think people are better as they can tailor explanations to an individual's background, expand upon unclear statements, and understand facial expressions but for many issues I hope this site will suffice or at least serve as a bandaid until a better solution exists. Additionally I think that our documentation could always be better and I hope to make a number of physical examples that live in the lab and can be interacted with in order to help get the creative juices flowing for the folks like myself that struggle coming up with creative and useful weekly goals when they are given assignments that are so open-ended. I like playing with things in person and find that it leads to thoughts like "man this is cool but what if it did this instead?" which are great jumping off points for the week. Finally I'll probably throw machine guides here for easy reference (note these vary vastly from shop to shop) and this is a bit of an excuse to play with different processes and make fun things while forcing documentation that I usually eschew.

Philosophy

While I have you on the main page I want to take the time to give a little bit of my personal advice for this class as well as life, the universe and everything. The biggest single bit of advice that I can possible give is to ask for help. I don't bite, no questions are stupid, and nothing makes me more upset than hearing after the fact about students who struggled alone for hours unable to solve an issue through the dead of night and just bashed their head against the wall for hours. There is a constructive amount of struggle in life but this is certainly not it. So much of problem solving hinges on prior knowledge that is often taken for granted and it is our job to help supplement your knowledge and intuition. Sometimes 90% of the problem is simply knowing what word to google or hinges on some misknomer such as thinking that mil is short for millimeter. Anyway please just speak up, I promise the social awkwardness will decrease over time and it'll get easier. I'm accessible via email, the issue tracker (often preferred so the same question serves as learning for others who undoubetly have it too), and my personal number is on our internal docs I just try not to post it on this public facing webpage.

Commands

• mkdocs new [dir-name] - Create a new project.
• mkdocs serve - Start the live-reloading docs server.
• mkdocs build - Build the documentation site.
• mkdocs -h - Print help message and exit.
• mkdocs gh-deploy - from within the web folder to push new chages to ampennes.github.io/htma-demos

Project layout

mkdocs.yml    # The configuration file.
docs/
    index.md  # The documentation homepage.
    ...       # Other markdown pages, images and other files.