3rd party PLSE services

The PLSE lab uses several third-party services heavily. This page describes them.

Github

Github hosts git version control repositories for our projects. We pay Github, so we can create private repositories and add collaborators, including from outside the university. The tendency is usually to start in a private repository, and to make the source code public after the project is published. We also have some other Github organizations like uwplse, typetools, randoop, codespecs, and FPBench.

Slack

Slack is a group-chat service, kind of like IRC with more emojis. We use slack pretty heavily in the #plse channel. Most projects also have channels of their own—those channels can be linked with Github, Travis, Trello, and similar services.

The lab runs several Slack bots: crossbot, deadbot, and spotify.

Travis

Travis is a continuous integration service that links well with Github. For publish projects, Travis will automatically run unit tests on every commit, and is fairly easy to set up. We have some expertise within the group on setting up Travis for most sorts of projects, including Coq proof checking and Z3-based projects. We also run other CI servers locally for projects that need more complex or computationally-intensive tests.

Trello

Trello is a light-weight project management service: you can create “cards” for things to do, and then organize those cards into “lists” and assign them to people. It tends to work well for small projects with multiple students working them.