Kilian Valkhof

Graduation (almost)

Last week I started my Graduation project. For the next 16 weeks, I will be researching usability on social networks, with the goal of increased participation at Wakoopa.

LaTeX

There was of course no way I was going through the hell of managing a 30-or-so page Word document. I decided to learn LaTeX (and BibTeX) which has powerful layout capabilities, and easy ways to keep track of all the references I use (within the document, and to other sources).

As it turns out, if you know HTML, LaTeX is really, really easy.

If you are a front-end developer that has to write documents every now and then, I’d definitively recommend you to start using it. It took me less then a day to get comfortable with it, and that included trying out a bunch of different editors.

Source Control

Because I use LaTeX, which is just plain text, it was a logical idea to just throw everything into a git repository.

Following that, I decided to place it on Github as well. This means I can work on it from any place that I want, that it’s securely backed-up, and that it’s really easy for others to read and suggest changes. Alper went as far as submitting a patch, Very Cool.

You can find my entire graduation project here: Kilian/Graduation on GitHub. I plan to make use of the issue tracker as well, and as you can see Issue #1 is: Graduate ;)

While my entire graduation project will be done in Dutch, I will release an English article listing quick-wins and tips for increasing participation on social networks through usability at the end of the project as well.

So, wish me luck and we’ll see what comes out of it at the end of those 16 weeks! :)