‘Tis the season of exam grading!

Due to the pandemic, we moved all teaching online. This included exams as well. Previously, students handed in physical copies of their exams for grading. However, this year things are different, and they end up uploading a single PDF containing their solutions. I ended with 40 PDFs to sift through.

For the last five years now, I have been involved in teaching the bachelor course on Industrial Automation. The course focuses on discrete and logical control. Apart from the lectures, the course contains two projects, one based on low-level PLC programming. The other focuses on modeling high-level discrete control programmed in Java. At the end of the course, the students integrate the Java and PLC parts of the project to have an end-to-end automated system.

Over the last five years, I have been improving and tweaking the Java part to automate most technical administration. I have integrated the checking of assignments into a Continuous Testing framework using GitHub classrooms and Travis to reduce my load of correcting them. This post is intended to document that process.

I use overleaf for all my academic and collaborative writing. However, I am not a big fan of cloud services. I would always want to have control over my data and not be dependent on external services and access to the internet for my day to day activities. Overleaf provides a good set of features for collaborative writing. And I see no easy way of avoiding it in my workflow.

An alternative way is to leverage the Git feature of overleaf to maintain and work on a local copy of the document. Additionally, this can be used to back-up the data on a Git server such as Github, Gitlab, or self-hosted Git service. The following is the guide I use to create and sync my work between GitHub and overleaf.

Its always fun to learn and implement new technologies. Travis-CI a FOSS for continuous integration and deployment, is one such tool I always wanted to learn. Finally, today, I did get some motivation to get started with Travis to auto build and deploy a paper I am currently writing in LaTex.

The code is hosted on Github within a private repository, Travis pro provides access to build, test and deploy from private repositories.

Installing Travis

Run the following commands to install and setup Travis-cli which will help auto-generation of configuration file .travis.yml. This file can also be created without the tool, auto generation always makes life easy.