Summer 2005 – From KS student to KS employee in 48 hours

After the success of the Student Registration System (regardless of the growing pains), the next step became very clear very quickly.  I don’t remember if Amy (not known as Mrs. Kimura from this point forward) told me or she and I collectively knew what the next step was.  In retrospect, the Student Registration System was the prototype for deploying a Web application to students to facilitate an existing process.  It was time to expand concept to include other processes as well as change the target audience to include parents.  The roughly two and a half-months after the registration system was finished the work develop KS Connect began.

KS Connect had to do the following:

1. Display Current Grades uploaded from teachers’ gradebooks (using the Basmati system).
2. Issue electronic progress reports.
3. Issue electronic grade checks.
4. Registration for the upcoming school year.

That was it.  Seems like a very small list compared to the feature set of the current version of KS Connect.

I remember graduating on May 29, 2005 with project grad going into May 30, 2009.  First day of work was Tuesday, May 31, 2009.  I can’t remember but I believe it was the following week when I was issued a KS laptop and given access to the student records system.

KS Connect was born the summer of 2005 and is now in its 5th year.

Appearance in Jay Fidel’s 2005 ThinkTech Law Series

In rummaging through the emails, I came across the email from Blaine to someone in the Endowment group about a presentation in Jay Fidel’s 2005 ThinkTech Law Series.  (Jay Fidel now publishes a column in the Honolulu Advertiser and currently leads ThinkTech Hawaii.)  I was asked to make an appearance to talk about developing software from KS as part of the Endowment group’s presentation.  It was definitely not part of the subject matter, something I realized very quickly after their part of the presentation concluded.

Anyway, Blaine confirmed my joining them.  See the exert below:

Hi Dana,

Not using Powerpoint, using Apple Keynote. We’ll bring our own laptop. UH Outreach classroom and conference room have built in projectors. We’ll need a net connection (they have plenty). The laptop will have wireless, too.

He can talk until you give him the cut signal from the back of the room. He was limited to 15 minutes for his HiTechQuest presentation, and he practiced it to precision, with time for a few Q&A afterward.

Trust me, it is top-level, professional.

Bliane

Yippppeeee!  (My non-professional response to Makoa joining us next Tuesday.)  Thanks for the great news, Blaine!  Could I get some basic information for our planning session:

1.       Will you need any equipment for the presentation?  We will be bringing our own PC laptop and projector.  Will you be bringing your own laptop or do you need us to get one set-up?

2.       How long is the presentation?  We’d like to keep down to 15-20 minutes.

3.       Could you send us a copy of the powerpoint in paper?  Remember, this is a non-tech person talking.  I just want to see each of the panels and I don’t think I have enough room on my computer to open up the presentation in power point.

FYI, we’re planning to take the both of you to dinner upstairs at the Plaza Club.

===============================

Yippppeeee!  (My non-professional response to Makoa joining us next Tuesday.)  Thanks for the great news, Blaine!  Could I get some basic information for our planning session:

1.       Will you need any equipment for the presentation?  We will be bringing our own PC laptop and projector.  Will you be bringing your own laptop or do you need us to get one set-up?

2.       How long is the presentation?  We’d like to keep down to 15-20 minutes.

3.       Could you send us a copy of the powerpoint in paper?  Remember, this is a non-tech person talking.  I just want to see each of the panels and I don’t think I have enough room on my computer to open up the presentation in power point.

FYI, we’re planning to take the both of you to dinner upstairs at the Plaza Club.

============================================

Not using Powerpoint, using Apple Keynote. We’ll bring our own laptop. UH Outreach classroom and conference room have built in projectors. We’ll need a net connection (they have plenty). The laptop will have wireless, too.

He can talk until you give him the cut signal from the back of the room. He was limited to 15 minutes for his HiTechQuest presentation, and he practiced it to precision, with time for a few Q&A afterward.

Trust me, it is top-level, professional.

Bliane

=============================================

Yes, Blaine did not spell his name correctly in the reply.  ;)

I remember presenting the Student Registration System, and I remember Jay Fidel being impressed.  He had heard of us from a little conference we put on in Midkiff called HiTechFest in 2004.  It was an attempt to do our own HiTech Quest but be more information rather than competitive.

You know someone is impressed when they can remember you two years later.  Dr. Larry Mordan, Science Dept Head, told me one day in Smith Office that he and Keoni Kaleiwahea went on Jay Fidel’s radio show to talk about the science fair.  And somehow I came up.  Jay didn’t remember my name but he remembered seeing that presentation.  Dr. Mordan told me that he and Keoni looked at each other and knew exactly to whom he was referring.  The episode podcast is here.  The start of the science segment is around 30 minutes into the podcast (closer to 31 minutes).  My mention was actually in the after-segment, which is here.  It’s around 23 minutes into the presentation when I’m mentioned.

The Naming Conversation

Many people ask me who came up with the name of what is now known as KS Connect.  The answer is me.  I came up with the name but with a little help from Blaine.

Take a look at this email conversation between Blaine and I:

When I began developing KS Connect, I went back to Peter’s original MyKS idea.  I even intended to give the system the same name, MyKS, mirrored after My Yahoo.  However, the name just didn’t stick like names should.  One just knows when the right name is discovered.  KS Connect was the right name (even though it started with a + sign).

So there you have it folks.  A little piece of history of how KS Connect got its name.  March 17, 2005 was when the name was created.  Blaine got to work quickly acquiring the domain connect.ksbe.edu, which is the domain we use today (ksconnect.ksbe.edu works too).

Founder’s Day 2004 – The Student Registration System Makes Its Debut

I remember that morning, December 17, 2004, in Mrs. Kimura’s office.  Dressed in dress whites getting ready for my last Founder’s Day (Dec. 19 was on a Sunday) as a student.  I was explaining how we should take the Course Catalog (we were getting for registration in the spring) online so that it’s searchable (not just in a PDF).  Her response to me was, “Why don’t we just do registration online?”  ”Wait, what?” “Have students choose their courses online.”  And that was it, the Student Registration System was born.  The system that precedes KS Connect.

December 17, 2004 – the idea was conceived.
December 18, 2004 – the building began.

The system had to be built by the time Christmas Break ended (2 weeks later).  It had to be ready to be presented and demoed.  Then it had to be rolled out with students and teachers.  The turn around time was very short.  Systems that take a whole year to build had to be done in 2-3 weeks.  Registration began at the beginning of February.  Teachers had to have their recommendations inputted into the system.

Well, the Student Registration System was built.  It was hosted on the Education Web Server (the same one that has all of the various domains on it – kapalama.ksbe.edu, maui.ksbe.edu, hawaii.ksbe.edu, etc.).  The server was about to work the hardest it had ever worked.

Mrs. Kimura and I also presented the system to the underclassmen in Large Group Guidance in the auditorium.  She talked, I controlled the laptop.  We demoed exactly what they had to do.  It was simple.  It was very awkward to be in there.  I was still a student.  It just felt…weird…a weirdness that would bother me for many years after.

And so began registration.  Three grade levels, which was around 1350 students, would be doing their registration in the Student Registration System.  And boy did they bring the system to its knees.  I remember Sandy Mauhili walking to the boys rehearsal for Song Contest in the Choral Room looking for me.  She pointed to me and with her finger motioned the signal to follow her.  See, while 10th and 12th grade (my grade) were rehearsing, 9th and 11th grade were registering…well…that’s what they were supposed to be doing.  The Education Web Server could not handle.  Blaine was freaking out.  The processor was topped off and would not process the requests.  Now, the thought process of both Blaine and me: 1) this is cool…the server is actually not responding…never thought I’d see the day we’d have this problem, but then reality sets in for 2) now how do we fix this…

I never had the problem of optimizing my code.  There just wasn’t enough traffic driven to the sites I had built to even think of this as a problem.  Well, as it turns out, the only real solution I remember was optimizing the SQL queries.  I wrote the queries as SELECT * FROM table1, table2, table3, which means all of the columns from all three tables had to load into memory.  BIG MISTAKE!  Do not SELECT * anything if it’s not some sort of backend site.  Once I changed the * to the fields I only needed, performance improved dramatically.  It was still slow, but at least the server was processing requests.

We eventually got through registration.  The last thing to do was to have bubble in their requests from the Student Registration System.  [Huh?  So you have them register online just to have them bubble in their stuff.  They'll bubble in whatever they want.]  Well, it turns out the bosses of both Blaine and the guy in charge of the student records system had heard about this.  There was a meeting setup to discuss how to move the data.  After that meeting, I programmed a script to extract the data into a format that could be imported into the student records system.  Emailed the file to the guy and whola, there were all of the requests for each student.  No scanning of bubble sheets.  No mis-reading of course requests.  Just a clean transfer of data.  Turns out the counselors were not happy that we did this because they had their students bubble in something different than what was in the Student Registration System.  Oh, well!

The only classes that used this system were the Classes of 2006, 2007, and 2008 from Kapalama.  No one else knows anything about the Student Registration System, not even my classmates.  It was a success.  I dropped out of AP Psychology the 2nd semester of my senior year to do this (day we came back from Christmas break we made the schedule change).  I think Kauka would understand that it was one of the smartest things I did.

Now, I should probably mention that there is one more person in this mix – the one who actually does the scheduling.  Ms. Cyriacks was my Pre-Calculus teacher junior year (I was in the one pre-calc section she taught, when she still taught it).  Ever wondered why she only taught (well, still does) three periods?  The other period was dedicated to student records or in this case, registration and scheduling.  Because I had her and spent so much time with her (and Mrs. Baldwin) in the mornings, I don’t think this would have happened without the student records system deciding I should be in her Pre-Calculus class.

It’s amazing what happens when the people with whom you work are able to control what occurs.  Mrs. Kimura’s job as Assistant Principal was scheduling, which including registration.  Any decisions around it were her decisions, including doing it online.  The only way to pull this off is when you have the administrative/political piece and the technical piece in place.  Recall, I still had full access to the Education Web Server to be able to execute something like this.  A system was built in 2 weeks, deployed, and used for two months.  Compare that to the Bulletin System, developed over a summer, and was deployed while registration was taking place.

Both systems were entered into HiTechQuest 2005.  I went solo this time entering the Bulletin System in “Using Technology to Communicate – Web site” and the Student Registration System in “Using Technology to Problem-Solve.”  The setup was not like last time.  Judges had a table to sit at with the presenter presenting the problem and the solution.  I had to present first for “Using Technology to Problem-Solve.”  Presentation was going well until the laptop died because I did not plug it in.  Oops!  Interrupted my presentation to plug the laptop back in and we were up and running.  Total of 10 seconds interrupted.  Did not affect the evaluation because the system took first place.  The Bulletin System took third.

Summer 2004 – The final summer with zztype

Summer 2004′s internship is the last summer I would call Blaine my supervisor.  My colleague that summer was Keoni Ochman, one of my classmates.  The crucial project for that summer was the Bulletin System.  It was a project I brought to this summer’s work.

The Daily Bulletin and Weekly Calendar were two documents that were produced Daily and bi-monthly, respectively.  I believe at around 10 AM the document was emailed to DDC for production.  Then, in the afternoon campus mail, delivered to the offices for distribution.  The envelopes were then placed back in the campus mail box for morning pickup only to be refilled for afternoon delivery.  And the Weekly Calendar had its own envelope but this process only occurred once every two weeks.

Well, I wanted to change that for obvious reasons.  There has to be a better way.  So that summer was dedicated to replicating that exact bulletin online.  Here were the stipulations in my mind:

1. This project wasn’t going to fly if it required changing the content of the bulletin. Just getting the content online was going to be enough of a leap.
2. The original bulletin had to be generatable (a printable version).
3. It had to be a swap.  We couldn’t have the offices doing both.  Doubling work was not an option.
4. Decentralize as much of the content as possible.  For example, we could extract the lunch from the Food Services Web site place it in the bulletin.  Food Service staff didn’t need to let the Student Activities office know what was for lunch.  They just enter it into their system and it affects everything connected to it.
5. The bulletin had to be emailed to everyone, including the students, the night before.

I got it working.  Blaine played that advisory role to make sure it was sellable.  But sell to whom?

For the answer to that question, we have to rewind back to junior year to introduce a key person.  Junior year was when I met Kumu Jimmy Chun.  Throughout the year I had spent time in his classroom (never had him as a teacher), and we would talk about Hawaiian History and Kamehameha.  In the summer, when he was teaching summer school, I would visit before I went down to the office for work.  I told him I was working on this Bulletin System.  And he wondered who I was going to present it to?  Of course, I didn’t really have an answer.  So he said come on, it is time for you to meet someone.

Looking in retrospect, if contact was not made with the right administrator, this project would be dead.  Kumu Chun took me to that administrator.

And entering from stage right, drumroll and great applause, was Mrs. Amy Kimura, the Assistant Principal.  The rest of this story, my story, the story of KS Connect, does not exist without her.

It was in July 2004 when I met Mrs. Kimura.  And if I recall that first conversation, she had already met me.  I had just never met her.  Somehow I think Mr. Fred Kramer and the counselors had something to do with that.  Thinking about it now, it looks like it was only a matter of time before she and I crossed paths.

I explained to her what I was doing.  She first said that she needed it presented to her for her ok.  Then, if it was ok, she said I would present it to administration on the day the administration returned.  It would be the first item on their agenda.  After my presentation, they were going to have the rest of their opening meeting, discussing, of course, what I presented in addition to a host of other issues.  She also said I had to prepare a handout that contained all of the information presented.  It was a date!  The presentation took place either end of July or early August.

I wish I had a copy of the original handout to post.  I knew what was at stake.  Blaine reviewed the handout.  Sent it to Mrs. Kimura for her review and copying.  And we were ready to roll.  Midkiff Listening/Viewing was where this took place.  Everyone from administration was there.  The people who had pictures in the student/parent handbook would be there.  I would be presenting to them.  It really wasn’t that big of a deal, but then, it was the coolest thing.  Presenting to the “decision-makers” (whether you liked them or not).

Thank goodness that presentation was not recorded.  It was terrible.  I remember Blaine telling me to SLOW DOWN (the mantra of my life going forward).  For someone who was on the speech team sophomore year, this should have been easy.  I don’t know what it was.  Maybe it was because there was actually something at stake, my first real presentation, and I blew it.  If I graded myself, it would be an F.  I just saw the looks of some of the administrators and they really couldn’t follow me.  There was a bright moment though: I remember Mr. Ramos, principal at the time, asking me if he could change the lunch, making a joke with Gordie from head of Food Services (like I said, everyone was there).  Regardless, I got through it, and admin went back to have the rest of their day.

Ended up hearing from Mrs. Kimura that admin approved it.  It was decided that they would move to the new system until such time that the Student Activities office would be ready to move to it.  I remember thinking to myself, “And when would that be?  Never?”  Regardless, Blaine said it was a success.  Mrs. Kimura did say I would have to present again, this time to department heads.  Say wha?  You want me to present again after I had just died the first time.

Come to find out, I did MUCH better the second time around.  I went slower, and I could tell the department heads were following.  The decision was already made so now that I’m thinking about this again I’m wondering why Mrs. Kimura decided to have me present to them.  Obviously, administratively, it was to keep the department heads in the loop.  But more importantly, I think it was important for me to get back out there and do the same presentation over again.  It certainly would not be last presentation.  I needed to master presenting ideas and my work because it would be crucial for what was about to happen next…

Anyway, to wrap up the story on the Bulletin System, it rolled out February 14, 2005 (I remember the date because it was Valentine’s day.)  The February 11, 2005 bulletin was the last bulletin to be on paper.  Never again would that distribution system exist.  From February 14, 2005, all bulletins were sent through email.

2003-2004 – Junior Year

Junior year was the transition year.  Peter was graduating and really getting into his New Hope job.  CyberWarriors took a back seat and was slowly handed to me.  But for our last act, the Food Services site got entered into the HiTechQuest contest held in March of 2003.  Our advisors were Clare Ho and Blaine Fergerstrom.

HiTechQuest ’03 was held at the Ala Moana hotel.  Oceanic had some conference going on in the main room so we got the area just outside.  The setup was like a science fair.  People walk around (eventually judges) and you talk about your project.  Blaine made us very professional good looking business cards to hand out.  It wasn’t just about the project, though.  You had to communicate your project to the judges so there was a speaking component.  And thanks to the Kamehameha speech program, well, that was a breeze.

The judges were impressed because we won first place in Using Technology to Problem-Solve.

Left to right: Jeff Bloom president of the HiTechQuest board of directors, Peter Thourson, Makoa Jacobsen and Mark Dowd of Micro

This was the end of the fun stuff.  What’s next is where the real foundation for KS Connect begins.

Summer 2003 – Internship with zztype, again.

I’m having a hard-time remembering what was built this summer.  Peter was not with us this summer.  He was already getting into his job as Webmaster for New Hope.  I do remember that my colleague that summer was Casey Mederios from ’04.  That was when I realized teaching PHP can be really difficult.  I told her to read the books I guess that was not how she learned.  She worked on a registration site that was pretty good for not having any experience.  She also, eventually, worked on kapolei.org, a site for Kapolei’s New Hope church.

I worked on a bunch of other projects.  I couldn’t exactly remember them but I do remember the one important thing Blaine had me do that summer.  Peter had built Blaine’s Food Services site but some things were not working correctly.  My job was to fix those problems.  Blaine also wanted me to add some bells and whistles, which included RSS feeds (RSS feeds were just starting to get popular), email subscription, and text-message subscription.  We also dabbled with a WAP version (for mobile phones).

2002-2003 – Sophomore Year

I only mention sophomore year for two reasons: 1) guidance, 2) Food Services.

In the presentation to parents regarding KS Connect, Fred Kramer mentioned that I started doing this my sophomore year.  I guess it’s true.  However, I like to think of the system for classmates to check when they had guidance as a very crude system, my first run.  It was simple though, and I believe this is how it worked: enter student ID#, get guidance schedule.  Sophomore guidance was only 8 times a semester and the posters were quite confusing.  So this was a chance to play and drive traffic to the CyberWarriors site.  Loaded everyone’s schedule into a database server and then wrote a PHP front-end for people to check their schedule.  Eventually, for Junior Year we added attendance and text messaging to the mix, based on what was done for Food Services, which is a Junior Year project.

Blaine had Peter working on another project – the Food Services Web site.  That Web site is still in existence.  The concept was simple: tell people what’s for lunch.  However, it became a lot more after looking at the back-end.  Peter had built the back-end with scheduling “meals” using pull-down menus.  A menu item had to first be added to a list that would then appear in the pull-down.  Eventually these lists were huge.  It had every food that was being served.  Then Blaine added on the news to the site and some auxiliary pages, such as recipes, which eventually got some press.  The Food Services site would not be ready for launch until after my second summer with zztype.

In the meantime, Peter was constantly working on the CyberWarriors Web site, trying to come up with ways to draw traffic.  I think the biggest hit was the song contest section (reproduced here) that was launched.  Peter had all of the lyrics posted for all of the songs.  I can’t remember if he eventually got the scores up after.  It was a feature that would exist for two more years after.

Summer 2002 Internship with zztype

I spent a total of three summers with zztype – Summers of 2002 (between freshman and sophomore year), 2003 (between sophomore and junior year), and 2004 (between junior and senior year).

I distinctly remember the first day.  I showed up to work in a nice-t-shirt, nice-shorts, and slippers (remember, I was 15).  At least Peter had pants on.  Well, when we showed up, we got yelled at.  Blaine said if he has to wear monkey clothes, you have to wear monkey clothes.  So we all wore monkey clothes.  And to add to that, we didn’t bring lunch.  So we raided Blaine’s saimin stash for lunch.  Eventually Lahela, who had just graduated, joined us.

Each summer had projects for us to work on, either stuff we brought to work on for KS or stuff Blaine had lined up for KS.  The first summer I took on the simple projects while Peter took on the monster projects.  Blaine was trying to provide services for the teachers to use, such as the photo gallery and ashnews (to post news and homework on their site).  Peter had modified ashnews to what Blaine needed it to do.  Peter also had this project in his mind. In retrospect though, it was more of a vision:

Peter's vision of MyKS. Circa May 2002. And based on the date in the screenshot, Peter was planning this rather than studying for finals.

Can anyone say KS Connect?  This is the first thought/model of some student portal that used information from the student records system.  I remember seeing this and thinking that this was great!  But how?  The biggest problem was where were we going to get the data to support this.  Peter and I tried to flush this idea out one day that summer.  The bottom line was that it was too soon.  Kamehameha wasn’t ready.  Peter could have built each component out but even if he did I think he would have failed.  There were too many pieces still missing, both technically and politically/administratively.

To give credit where credit is due, Peter came up with the vision.  I remembered his vision.

The Beginning: CyberWarriors and zztype

(the last post for tonight)

There are two sides that must be explained: my technical knowledge and my “work” knowledge.  The technical knowledge comes first.

I was a freshman at Kamehameha, circa 2001, when I joined CyberWarriors.  CyberWarriors was the computer club on campus (warrior is our school mascot).  The details are foggy because I was a puny freshman.  Here were the members in a QuickTime VR that Blaine took of the members in Midkiff.  I remember an upperclassman named Peter Thourson ’04 (now webmaster of enewhope.org for you New Hope churchgoers) told me to learn two things: PHP & MySQL.  So I bought two books, both O’Reilly books, one titled PHP and the other titled MySQL.

===  ASIDE: What’s PHP?  and what the heck is MySQL?

PHP is a server-side scripting language.  MySQL is a database server.  The two go hand-in-hand when developing sites.  To deliver a dynamic Web site or Web application, you need a data source to hold all of your data (MySQL) and something to process what users do to the data in MySQL (PHP).  Example: WordPress is written in PHP.  The blog posts you write go into a database.

===

So I learned how to program in PHP and SQL (the language to communicate with the database).

Why did Peter tell me to learn those languages?

Well, there was something else going on.  Web sites have to be hosted on a server.  Blaine Fergerstrom, aka zztype, was hired as the Education Webmaster (I’m not even sure how the position got created at Kamehameha).  Blaine came to us from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin; his job was to publish the online edition of the Star-Bulletin every night.  Blaine is a Mac.  The server Blaine deployed was a Mac that ran, guess what?!?!?  PHP (on the Apache Web Server) & MySQL.  CyberWarriors now had a new platform to deploy on.  But the most amazing part: Blaine was going to trust us, a freshman and sophomore, to publish on a public Web server, without his approval!  I remember him telling us don’t do anything stupid and don’t publish hate sites against Dr. Chun, for example.

=== TIDBIT

The sites kapalama.ksbe.edu, maui.ksbe.edu, hawaii.ksbe.edu, preschool.ksbe.edu,extension.ksbe.edu, etc. were started by Blaine running on one PowerMac G4 tower.  This was known as the Education Web Server.  All “education” content of Kamehameha was published on it, including teacher Web sites, and eventually the CyberWarriors site.

===

Now, some readers might be hyperventilating to learn that we had access to a public server and could publish without approval.  You have to remember: 1) The kind of students Peter and I were – the type not about to do anything stupid, and 2) it is this trust that is so important to both Peter’s story, my story, and the story of KS Connect (more on that later). Without the trust, the rest doesn’t exist.