CSC321.01 2017F, Class 01: An Introduction to the Course

Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Upcoming Work.
• What is this course?
• Course goals.
• Why this course?
• (Possibly) setup time.

Preliminaries

Admin

• We have a guest speaker for the first part of today’s class. We’ll let her speak and then return to this
• Welcome back! I think I know most of you, and I’m happy to be able to teach you again.
• But I’m still taking attendance.
• CS Table Tuesday!
• CS Extras Thursday: Research opportunities at Grinnell.
• I switched my course building tools and do not yet have the course site ready. Cross your fingers that it will be up soon.

Upcoming Work

• Set up way too many accounts
• Learn Ruby
• Codecademy Ruby Tutorial for Wednesday https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ruby
• EdX Ruby Exercises for Wednesday. (Details forthcoming in email.)

What is this course?

Course in how you build software

• Principles of good software
• Practices for building software

We will focus on

• Agile methods
• Software as a Service - Tools related to the Ruby on Rails platform

Course goals

What do you expect to see covered in this course? What do you want to see covered in this course?

• Make a list of five topics.
• In groups of three, share your answers with each other.
  • This is an opportunity to make sure that all of you talk.
  • This is an opportunity to make sure that we get a variety of ideas heard.

Large project design

• How to modularize a code base
• Dealing with clients
• Testing
• Collaboration, and version control
• Separating dev from running
• Design patterns
• Legacy software

Good UI principles

• Accessibility

Technical annoyances

• How to set up and configure Ruby.
• Build software
• Cloud-based development with C9.
• Deploy with Heroku.

Redundant

• SaaS
• Methodologies, particularly agile

Things that really happen in CSC 322

• Ethics of softare design
• Team building
• Delegation
• Dealing with clients

Misc.

• How do you teach yourselves new things?

Why this course?

Why are you here?

• It’s required for the CS major, and I’ve done almost everything else.
• Seems valuable to have (e.g., knowing agile, knowing about teams).
• Bridge to the real world: It’s a different model of software development than we normally do.
• Think more about the human side of programming.
• Remind you that as CS majors you can quickly put together interesting interactive projects

Course structure

• Seven week course, three days per week.
• During this half of the semester, you are expected to do about twelve hours per week on this class.
• Some days: Work on a lab assignment in teams.
• Some days: Discuss readings/videos.

(Possibly) setup time

Sign up for accounts on

a. http://github.com - Version control ; email me your gitid.

b. http://edge.edx.org - SPOC

c. http://www.edx.org - MOOC

d. http://grinnell-cs.slack.com - Communication

e. http://c9.io - Cloud-based VM (may require credit card)

f. https://www.codecademy.com/ - Learning

g. https://trello.com/ - Task management

h. https://www.heroku.com/ - Deploy rails apps

Work time

Start the Codecademy Ruby Tutorial. https://www.codecademy.com/learn/ruby