Project studio: the system comes together
420-302-VA · WEEK 12 · FALL 2026

Utility · for going further

Resources

A short shelf this week, on purpose: the studio's references are mostly the course's own earlier pages, now used as a toolbox. The external links cover the three theory ideas, skeleton, integration, services, at their sources.

  • Start your project with a walking skeleton (H. Dolfing): the method in full, with Cockburn's original definition quoted; the books behind it are Cockburn's Crystal Clear (2004) and Freeman & Pryce, Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (2009).
  • Integration testing (Wikipedia): big-bang versus incremental strategies, named and compared; your bench order is a bottom-up instance.
  • Binary search (Wikipedia): the ⌈log2 n⌉ guarantee behind half-splitting, in its original habitat.
  • Rubber duck debugging (Wikipedia): the Hunt & Thomas technique, and why explaining aloud finds the skipped assumption.
  • systemd.service (freedesktop.org): the authoritative reference for every line of your unit file, ExecStart, Restart=, RestartSec= and the rest; pair it with journalctl for the reading side.
  • Merge conflicts (Atlassian): Week 1's ritual, for the day it meets a deadline.

The probes, by week

InstrumentProbesTaught in
REPL and print over serialSensor and node codeWeek 8: ESP32 & analog
Firehose mosquitto_sub -t "#" -v, mosquitto_pub as stubEverything the broker carriesWeek 9: MQTT & Wi-Fi
Controller logs, step testsThe rule and the loopWeek 10: Control
curl, the browser console, the Network tabBridge, routes, pageWeek 11: Flask
systemctl, journalctlServices and their nightsWeek 9, and this hub

The project's own shelf

The LIA project hub carries the standing reference from here to the demo: the brief decoded, all five milestones with evaluation points, the pair method, demo-day protocol, and the full reference shelf organized by subsystem. The Fall 2026 course outline and the LIA brief are on Omnivox, and the brief governs.