George is a set of utilities for Zipfian Academy curriculum development.

George expects a particular structure.

• Each project is a directory that contains

  • readme.md
  • a git submodule called data.
  • a few sprint directories

• Each sprint is a directory that contains

  • Exercise code stubs in code
  • Corresponding tests in test, written to be run by nose (Python), Urchin (shell) or testthat (R).
  • slides.md containing an outline of the lecture, intended to be compiled with reveal.js
  • readme.md containing these sections
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • ...

Install george so you can structure and check sprints

pip install .

Install hub so you can easily make repositories on GitHub.

gem install hub

Enter the sprint's directory.

cd nytimes

Start a git repository.

git init
touch readme.md
git add readme.md
git commit . -m initialize

Put it on GitHub

hub create -p zipfian/nytimes # -p for private
git push -u origin master

Make the data submodule

git submodule add git@github.com:zipfian/nytimes-data.git data

Scaffold a sprint.

mkdir using-json-apis
cd using-json-apis
george init-sprint

As you're working on the sprint, check that a sprint contains all of its components.

george check-sprint

If the project has tests to drive students' exercises, you can run them. george runs tests with nose (python), urchin (shell) and testthat (R).

george run-tests

And check that the project is complete.

cd ..
george check-project

You can install george with ./setup.py develop so that you'll always be using the latest version of the george python library, but that doesn't set up the bin/george file in /usr/bin to be updated when you edit it.

Let's talk about three layers of tests.

1. Each sprint contains tests that students use to see how far they've gone in their work. These are written in python (nose), shell (urchin) or R (testthat).
2. George checks that the first layer of tests exists and that the tests correspond to the code stubs. These are written in python's standard unittest library.
3. There are tests of the george program to make sure that the second layer of tests work as intended. These are written in nose.

Run unit tests of the george program (test layer three) like so.

nosetests

We don't have a good system for integration tests on the command-line interface.