Dirigible Landed in the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics

For third consecutive year, the User Assistance (UA) team of SAP Labs Bulgaria holds a Software Documentation course at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’. The number of participating students is growing rapidly and this year it has reached one hundred.

The main idea of the course is to present the Technical Communicator profession as well as to give students the opportunity to dive in this area and guide them through their first steps. For that purpose, we needed an open-source software to be documented by the students. It had to be easily accessible, innovative, interesting, and with a simple UI in order to grab their attention. That’s how Eclipse Dirigible took central part in the Software Documentation course.

Eclipse Dirigible is a Cloud Development Platform providing development tools and a runtime environment. Dirigible provides capabilities for end-to-end development processes – modeling and management of databases, development of RESTful services, generation of pattern-based user interfaces, role-based security, integration of external services, testing, debugging, operations, and monitoring. Dirigible also supports full development lifecycle of on-demand applications by leveraging in-system programming models and rapid application development techniques.

The most important thing for us is that Dirigible enables the students to develop their own projects, test different technologies and scenarios, learn popular programming languages.

As a member of the UA team and a graphic expert, I prepared the lecture and the assignments concerning Simple Graphics and Infographics. The lecture includes the general principles of creating graphics and infographics, typography basics, and the required software for the purpose. The assignments for the past two years consisted of creating a simple graphic for a certain task or feature, revamping existing graphics, or creating an infographic including determined information.

Here is what two of our students came up with last year:

I am looking forward to seeing more well-executed assignments at the end of the curriculum this year. I hope to meet some of the students as contributors to the open-source world and more specifically to the Eclipse Dirigible project.