COMP1531 | Congratulations on finishing the exam

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 03 May 2022, 05:36:39 PM.

Hi everyone!

Firstly I just wanted to congratulate all of you on completing the COMP1531 final exam - for most of you, this marks the end of your time here with us at COMP1531! The term has flown by so fast.

I wanted to quickly cast you all back to week 1, where for most of you it was the first time you had used Python and git - and we were all amazed by how dynamic and expressive Python could be (how cool are f-strings!?), and frustrated with some difficulties in setting up gitlab:

In just a few weeks, you have worked in teams using industry tools to build a real backend HTTP system, tested it, deployed it to the cloud, and even dabbled with more advanced Python concepts like decorators in the final exam.

Regardless of how you feel about your grades so far, remember to reflect back on how far you've come and remember that's what matters most at the end of the day. If you do go into a career of Software Engineering, I hope you look back at COMP1531 fondly every time you clone and contribute to a git repo :)

In terms of the final exam, we will begin marking for it ASAP, although we aren't releasing results prior to the final release date, so your final COMP1531 mark will be available to you when the official UNSW results come out. From this it will be very easy for you to tell what exam mark you got based on some deduction.

Many of you have already reached out to me on LinkedIn - if you'd like to do so (or do not have an account), feel free to add me here , I often share opportunities there, and would love to keep an eye on all of your careers as they unfold! If you see me on campus, please say hey!

All the best with the rest of your exams, otherwise have a good inter-term break.

Jake Renzella + COMP1531 team :)

COMP1531 | Exam commencing at 9am, IMPORTANT INFORMATION

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 03 May 2022, 08:50:26 AM.

Dear students,

The COMP1531 final exam is about to begin, here's everything you need to know:

• The exam spec, when released at 9am , will be available here . This repo is read-only (you do not need to clone it) and contains all the questions for the final exam. If you can't access this repo after 9am Sydney time, please post on the forum
• The exam spec will contain a link to your individual exam repo . This repo you need to clone, write your solutions in the relevant files, and push to the master branch. You should push as you go, do not leave it to the last second to push all your solutions.
• Use the forum for any exam-related enquiries

Communication & Help during the exam

This exam is an open book exam, meaning you are able to use the internet and other resources to their full extent. The one exception to this is that you are prohibited from seeking help from other students during the exam.

If you have questions or clarifications needed during the exam, you can make a PRIVATE post on our forum . Do not message lecturers or tutors on MS teams. Do not email lecturers or tutors about issues that are not of a sensitive nature.

When posting a message to the forum, it's important that you are detailed in your description of your issues. If you are having technical issues:

• Make sure your most recent code is up on gitlab
  
• Show screenshots of the issue (code, terminal, etc)
• Explain how you produced it
• Whether you're running it locally or in vlab

Failure to comply may result in delays in responding to your queries.

Clarifications made during the exam will be made at the top of the spec released on gitlab. After each clarification, an email will be sent to all students in the course notifying them that a clarification has been made.

Good luck everyone with the final COMP1531 exam!

COMP1531 | Final lecture (not exam) about to start!

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 20 April 2022, 01:55:44 PM, last modified Wednesday 20 April 2022, 02:08:03 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | MyExperience Survey

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 19 April 2022, 11:22:34 AM.

Dear students,

Apologies for the multiple email announcements.

The COMP1531 UNSW MyExperience survey is available for completion at the URL: https://go.blueja.io/6HmbYv5-OU6IhYqsxWrcEg

Completing the MyExperience is one of the most helpful things you can do for the teaching team here in COMP1531. It would really mean a lot if you could just take 5 minutes to fill it in. The information is extremely useful for us in understanding how we're doing and where we need to focus attention.

I will likely send a few reminders about this, as will your tutors :)

Best,

COMP1531 Teaching Team

COMP1531 | Iteration 3 Peer Review - complete ASAP

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 19 April 2022, 11:13:07 AM.

Please complete by Sunday 10am (earlier is better):
https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?i...

:)

COMP1531 | Week 10 Lecture 1 now live, penultimate lecture already :(

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 19 April 2022, 11:02:40 AM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Iteration 2 preliminary results released (correction on lab due time)

Posted by Jake Renzella Thursday 14 April 2022, 04:23:58 PM, last modified Thursday 14 April 2022, 04:54:55 PM.

Hi everyone,

We have released preliminary iteration 2 results. You can find these to confirm on WebCMS under your grades.

Please note: Not all grades have been finalised, and not all special consideration scaling/averaging has been applied yet - I just wanted to get these out ASAP.

As always please don't stress if you see any glaring issues - just let your tutor know and we will fix up what we need to in one of the various marking systems :)

Also note that this week's labs will be due on Tuesday 5pm, not Monday due to the public holiday.

I hope you are all able to enjoy some part of the long weekend with friends and family where possible.

Best,

COMP1531 Team.

COMP1531 | Week 9 Lecture 2 going live soon

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 13 April 2022, 01:53:20 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Good Friday Classes Adjustment

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 13 April 2022, 01:15:19 PM.

Hi all, this message is for all Friday tute-lab students.

As you know, Friday Week 9 is Good Friday - which means Friday tut-labs are not going ahead this week (very sad). J ust to reiterate, there will be no in-person teaching on Friday (the campus is closed).

To respond, we will make the following adjustments:

• An online tutorial will be recorded and made available to all students
• A reduced number of Friday classes will go ahead as an optional, online help-session/tutorial hybrids. Your tutor will be in touch our tutor to let you know if this is the case.
• No attendance/participation marks will be recorded for Friday classes (as normal for Mon-Thu).
• We will run an extra help session or two to compensate if you need help.

Please keep your eye on emails from your tutor for more specific details.

COMP1531 Teaching Team

COMP1531 | Lecture 9 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 12 April 2022, 11:01:39 AM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

Week 8 Tuesday Lecture Recap

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 05 April 2022, 04:10:08 PM.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the lecture today, and appreciate your patience with the cut out in the first part. To avoid any confusion with multiple links and other items, I have re-uploaded the videos to two videos (one for each lecture):

1. Design - System Modelling
2. Deployment - Intro

The video quality might be lower for the next few hours as YouTube processes the 1080p@60 version. These links are also currently accessible on the Lecture page .

Jake will be adding these to the COMP1531 Playlist next week for easy reference in the future as these are not hosted on his YouTube channel.

Tomorrow's lecture should go without the hiccup, so see you then! Remember that tomorrow's lecture (whatever it is) will be on revision content. If you have specific things you want us to delve into more comment here .

Hayden

Week 8 Lecture 1 (Tuesday)

Posted by Hayden 🎉 Tuesday 05 April 2022, 10:58:47 AM, last modified Tuesday 05 April 2022, 03:32:23 PM.

Today's lectures were in two parts:

1. Design - System Modelling
2. Deployment - Intro

COMP1531 | Gitlab down at 8pm today + this week's lectures

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 04 April 2022, 01:01:32 PM, last modified Monday 04 April 2022, 01:03:00 PM.

Hi all,

We are hard at work finalising iteration 2 marks - and hope to have these back to you soon.

Some quick announcements for this week:

Hayden Smith will be delivering the Tuesday and Wednesday lectures! - you must use the following links to access the lectures at the same time as the usual lectures:

Tuesday , Wednesday

On Wednesday Hayden will be giving some bonus lecture content, which can include a re-hash of existing topics. Please complete this form: https://forms.office.com/r/YXqVnFXqe4 to let us know which topics you'd like covered again.

I hope you are all as excited for Hayden's lectures as I am, I will leave it to Hayden to introduce himself to those of you who may not know who he is.

Best,

COMP1531 Teaching Team

COMP1531 | Week 7 Lecture 2 now live

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 30 March 2022, 02:02:53 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Iteration 3 video released in playlist, link enclosed

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 29 March 2022, 05:47:38 PM.

Here's the updated playlist with today's lecture with timestamps! And the iteration 3 introduction video - some cool stuff in iteration 3 :)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuaWy6aHa2X...

COMP1531 | Week 7 Lecture 1 now live

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 29 March 2022, 11:02:56 AM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Good work + Iteration 2 peer review

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 28 March 2022, 05:47:53 PM.

Hi everyone,

Good work on submitting your iteration 2! I know many of you have been putting in a lot of hard work, regardless of how it went you should all be very proud of your progress - I definitely am.

This is a quick reminder to complete the iteration 2 peer review form .

We are starting to run the automarker now, and looking into any groups that seem to be getting very low or odd results to see if there's anything we can do on our end to fix up the score. Remember there are many opportunities to improve your score after the submission, if your group made minor issues that heavily impacted the score we will re-run the marker with a small penalty. If we think the mistake was reasonable, there will be no penalty. Then of course we have individual scaling.

Also keep in mind the automarking is just one component of the overall iteration grade.

So this is all to say good work, please continue to reach out to your tutor if you need support, don't stress if you see something odd, we will work with you to sort it out.

Best,

Jake + COMP1531 Teaching Team

COMP1531 | Iteration 2 final notes on submission

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 28 March 2022, 12:55:24 AM.

Hi all,

• When you run the submit command you may see a message about receiving 0 marks - you can ignore this, this submission isn't even running autotests. Of course we will mark your submissions correctly.
• I've just received some feedback via the course feedback form that we shouldn't have released the week 10 labs during the submission window - I agree, I stopped the lab rollout within an hour of it starting (at 5pm), so it only rolled out to a few groups. The pipeline is slow because of all the iteration submissions, and there's just not much I can do about it.
  • On this, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE PIPELINE TO MERGE - you can click the dropdown arrow and merge immediately, and you should already be running pytest, coverage and dryruns locally before you push, then can can keep an eye on the pipelines to make sure it was all OK.

Remember, if things go very wrong we can always re-run your code after the fact :) We are on your side.

All the best - please look after yourselves and get some sleep too.

Kind regards,

Jake Renzella

COMP1531 | Extra help session

Posted by Jake Renzella Saturday 26 March 2022, 11:41:25 AM.

An extra help session will run tomorrow at 11am for last minute help before iteration 2 is due. Thanks to Miguel and Sienna for offering their weekends to help! As always, find the meeting time in the Course Teams HelpSession channel.

COMP1531 | Iteration 2 submission reminder

Posted by Jake Renzella Friday 25 March 2022, 05:27:27 PM.

Hi all,

As you are well aware, the submission for iteration 2 is this coming Monday 28th March, at 10am.

Here's a few handy checklist items to run through when submitting the iteration:

• Is your merged and checked code on the master branch and pushed to your repo?
• Did you hardcode the port number in any of your tests? You should use the port configured in: src/config.py
• Did you remove debug mode from your Flask server?
• Have you submitted with: 1531 submit [iteration] [groupname]
  
• Have you completed the peer feedback form for iteration 2 ?

And even some more helpful things to keep in mind that the tutors have recomended:

• Amy S : If they're struggling to figure out what's causing really low marks in the leaderboard, they can try running against the front end. May be something useful for students who haven't figured out what's going wrong.
• Simon :
  • did you modify server.py so that flask uses a random port? change it back to config.py if so.
  • have you made sure your code is pylinted and pyformatted and getting a high coverage score?
  • have you made sure all the tasks on the gitlab taskboard are now closed?
• Tam:
  
  • Don't forget to run:1531 dryrun 2
  • section 6.9.2 description= - not important for automarking, but when demo-ing in wk7 you will need to connect to the frontend.
  • make sure meeting minutes / standups are in the master branch or repo wiki

All of you have worked very hard on iteration 2 throughout a challenging term with flooding, COVID, etc. Just another reminder that we are on your side, and aim to make everything fair when it comes to marking - right now I am still going through many iteration 1 special consideration requests and scaling marks up.

Kind regards,

COMP1531 Teaching Team

COMP1531 | Issue with lab01 grades

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 23 March 2022, 05:38:49 PM.

If you have a 0/2 for lab01 we are aware of the issue and fixing it, sorry about that! The joys of software systems.

Any other issues please let your tutor know.

Jake

COMP1531 | Tentative Grades Released

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 23 March 2022, 03:28:20 PM.

Hi everyone,

I've just released the first 4 lab marks + iteration 1 marks to your grades page on webcms.

Please note: THESE ARE TENTATIVE. There are a large number of students and many places where clerical or system errors can get things wrong, so please check your marks and if anything looks off please do not stress, just let your tutor know and we will sort it out.

The other thing to note is that if you have special considerations or ELS and these are not reflected in your grades, again please let your tutor know and we will manually get it fixed.

Hope iteration 2 is coming along, I know you're all working very hard on it.

Kind regards,

Jake Renzella + Teaching team

COMP1531 | End of week 5 important updates

Posted by Jake Renzella Friday 18 March 2022, 04:23:35 PM, last modified Friday 18 March 2022, 04:37:29 PM.

Hey everyone! Flex week is next week. I know you have all been very busy and I hope next week provides an opportunity to catch up where needed and take a break from scheduled classes.

Iteration 1 Marks (released early next week)

Iteration 1 marks will be made available early next week . I planned to release these today but since we extended the check-ins due to the floods, we need just a bit more time to finalise the marking. You will be able to find your grade on the grades page .

This iteration 1 grade will be a combination of your automarking marks, manual marks, and individual contributions (where applicable if contributions were uneven). Your tutor should have already provided you with written or verbal feedback for iteration 1. If any feedback was missing, feel free to reach out to them.

Please note: iteration marks are subject to change if new information is made available throughout the course about your group dynamic (where evidence can be provided) that was not previously known to your tutor.

Attendance / Participation / lab marks mid-term update

(released early next week)

We will also release an interim participation mark on the grades page called "participation_first5weeks". This is your mark for tutes 1-4 inclusive, and is out of 4. This will take into account weeks with no participation marks (due to the floods).

Remember that if your interim mark is 2.5/4, you are still able to get full marks for the class mark if you are scoring full marks in each lab.

If you have an email from me or special consideration confirming that you have a pending mark estimate due to missed tutorial, this will not be reflected in this mark as it is applied at the end of term.

If you believe there has been a clerical error in your mark, please email your tutor :) This is a large course, so it is possible - please don't stress, just let us know.

In week 10 we will release the full participation mark for the remaining tutorials.

Iteration 2 (due Monday 28th March)

Iteration 2 is due on 10am Monday 28th March ( week 7 ). Make sure you aren't pushing at the last minute, and don't forget to submit via the command line (1531 submit iteration2 [group]).

The leaderboard will be run during week 6 according to the timeline set out in the spec. We will not run it more than those 3 times, so use those opportunities strategically to get a sense of how you're going.

Week 4 and 5 lectures were certainly quite a lot to take in. In the past there has been some confusion around the data submitted in the HTTP requests, Some questions arose on the forum about different types of requests, so we will summarise them again below:

• GET:
  • Input comes in via request.args.get('X') , which pulls data from the URL query string
  • Output is returned as a JSON dump of dictionary ( json.dumps(Y) ) which sends it via the body of the response
• POST, PUT, DELETE
  • Input comes in via the body as JSON, which is captured into a python dictionary with request.get_json()
  • Output is returned as a JSON dump of dictionary ( json.dumps(Y) ) which sends it via the body of the response

Don't doubt yourself too much on the flask stuff either. Remember that if you're in doubt, you can just try running your code against the dry runs provided for iteration 2. You will only pass the dryruns if you've understood the above correctly, so it's a good sanity check.

Week 7 Lectures

Next week + help sessions

Week 6 is flex week! That means we have no lectures, no tutorials, and no labs!

(by Eliza Lee)

During week 6, keep an eye on the help sessions schedule in Microsoft Teams as they are subject to change due to flex week availability!

WebCMS outage

I have been informed that on Monday (21st) morning 8am-10am WebCMS will be down. Here is a link to the lecture playlist if you happen to need it to review lecture content on Monday morning.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuaWy6aHa2X...

COMP1531 | Week 5 Lecture 2 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 16 March 2022, 01:54:57 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Week 5 Lecture 1 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 15 March 2022, 10:44:40 AM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Welcome to week 5

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 15 March 2022, 08:18:36 AM.

Hi everyone!

Some updates for you to get into week 5

Iteration 1

Congratulations to everyone again for the stellar iteration 1 automarks. Your tutors are currently doing the rest of the marking and any necessary individual adjustments.

• How do I find my final automark result?
  • Just checkout the leaderboard, but if your tutor ran re-runs they will let you know your updated score.
• How can I see why I got those marks?
  • We have pushed two text files to a branch on your group repo called " iter1-results "
  • This is the pytest output that has come from running both your tests and our tests against your implementation.
  • The names of the tests and the errors should be indicators to you as to what you've done wrong.
  • Your tutor will give you some feedback.
• When will I get my final iteration 1 mark?
  • We're intending to release your iteration 1 mark late on Friday night of week 5. This will be a single mark that takes into account the automark, manual mark, and any adjustments if individual contributions were notably unequal.
  • You can also expect feedback on the manual marking part of iteration 1 if you haven't already received it. Ask your tutor this week if necessary :)

Iteration 2

Iteration 2 was released on Monday evening of week 4.

The lectures in week 4 were extensive in covering most of the core content you need to get going with iteration 2.

Iteration 2 is a fairly big iteration, so make sure you get started (if you haven't already).

Remember that for iteration 2 we're focusing only on HTTP tests . You can reuse all of your tests from iteration 1, though you'll meed to either wrap or modify these tests so that its testing your server by making HTTP requests. This is exactly what we've been demonstrating in lectures in week 4.

Lecture

See you all at 11 @ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

Other than that, we hope you've had a good week :) Only 1 more week until your flex week!

Week 4 Lecture 2 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 09 March 2022, 01:54:26 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

Update on attendance/project check-ins for in-person tutorials this week

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 09 March 2022, 10:53:04 AM.

Firstly, I hope everyone is staying safe from the floods. I'm getting a lot of emails from students who are having trouble getting into campus - and some tutors too. For the rest of the week:

• Your tutor may require the tutorial/lab to move online - in this case your tutor will email you with as much notice as possible, so please keep an eye on your emails, or setup email forwarding to an account you check more often.
• There will be no requirements for in person attendance this week - you can instead attend an online tutorial or access a recorded tutorial to view. Please let your tutor know if you won't be able to attend your class this week and they will support students
• With the project checkin, if you can attend your in-person tutorial then you will do the check-in as per usual. Your tutor may also complete your check-in remotely via Teams, and finally we will extend check-in deadline for in-person tutorials by a week to give everyone some leeway.

One last note, some of the lecture slides linked on WebCMS have QR codes to last term's lecture feedback forms - the QR code on the lecture PDFs and lectures point to this URL: https://forms.office.com/r/KTm8JNz04Q . This is the correct URL for all lecture feedback for 22T1.

For general (non-lecture) feedback, we also have this form: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?i...

We read every response to feedback and try to improve the course experience as we go - so this is just a reminder to please complete the (correct 22T1!) feedback forms if you have any feedback you'd like to share.

Apologies for the disruptions caused by the weather! As always please reach out to your tutor if you have any queries.

Kind regards,

Jake Renzella

URGENT: 5PM classes today are to be taken online due to flooding

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 08 March 2022, 03:40:47 PM.

Hi everyone,

The disruptions caused by the flooding today are making it difficult or unsafe to transit to campus for many of you (and us). As such from now, today's 5pm in-person classes will be held online.

It looks like it will start to ease tomorrow, so for now the rest of the week is as-scheduled.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused and especially due to the late notice.

Your safety is our primary concern - if you have already made it in to campus you can grab a quiet spot to call into your tute/lab.

Jake

Week 4 Lecture 1 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 08 March 2022, 11:00:28 AM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

Iteration 1 - Sunday 6pm-8pm Help Session added

Posted by Jake Renzella Saturday 05 March 2022, 04:27:08 PM.

Hey everyone, other quick update: two tutors will be available on the Teams help session at 6pm to offer list-ditch support for iteration 1. Big thanks to Yuval and Miguel for offering their Sunday :)

Hope this helps and all the best.

End of week 3, iteration 1 submission on Monday + Peer review details

Posted by Jake Renzella Saturday 05 March 2022, 04:10:37 PM.

Hi everyone!

We hope you've had a good week :) Some updates below!

Iteration 1 Due Monday

• Iteration 1 is due at 10am on Monday the 7th of March . We don't accept late submissions (we have automarking to run!)
• You can view the tests that we are using as part of the dryrun by running the following command on a CSE terminal: " cat ~cs1531/bin/iter1_test.py ". This will print to the terminal the file that contains the pytests we use for the dryrun. Please remember the dry run is not the leaderboard (read the spec again if confused).
• We've updated the project starter code with an additional clarification around testing and the update of certain function stubs. These changes should appear in your project-backend as merge requests, where you can choose to merge in the update, view the changes, or other. We suggest if you merge, to merge master into the update first in order to fix conflicts or pipeline issues. If you have any issues doing this, let us know on the forums.
• Good luck! Keep up the great work.

Iteration 1 Peer Review

• As part of iteration 1, you're required to complete a peer review of your team members. The review will be open for 48 hours between 10am Monday 7th March, and 10am Wednesday 9th March. Mark penalties may apply if you do not fill it in.
• To access the peer review once it's open, click on Iteration 1 Peer Review .
• This peer reviews, along with your other contributions, will be what your tutor uses to assign your iteration 1 mark (which is sometimes the same for all group members, sometimes different).

Iteration 2 Release

• Iteration 2's README + code will be automatically pushed to your group's repo on Monday evening. Keep an eye out for it!
• Don't worry, this doesn't stop you demonstrating code during your lab in week 4. Your tutor can show you how to go back to a previous commit.

Content Release

• Lectures this week will be including the topics 4.2 and 4.3 that cover HTTP, Flask, and more testing. These are all critical topics for iteration 2.
• Lecture 4.1 (Data Transfer) is important to watch before the week 4 lectures. This will be pre-recorded and released by Monday!

Have a good weekend! We'll see you all next week!

Changes to formatif assessment

Posted by Jake Renzella Thursday 03 March 2022, 11:24:39 AM.

Hey everyone, hope you're all staying safe with the storms.

An update with the formatif component of the lab marking - I've been collecting feedback from you all, and the teaching team regarding this, and the consensus is that there's not always much value in having this activity mandated each week. having said that, some of you seem to enjoy the process and get a lot out of it (especially if you are studying online).

To respond, we will no longer make the formatif component mandatory each week, and it will have no marks associated with it - instead it is now an optional activity that you can chose to engage in if you wish to ask for some personal feedback from your tutor. This change will be retroactive, so no marks will be associated with formatif from week 1 or 2 either. The entire mark will come from your submission to gitlab (as per normal).

Additionally, some lab activities that don't utilise the gitlab pipeline very well (such as activities without code) may instead switch to formatif tasks - where you would upload your work to formatif for a discussion. In these circumstances, it will be very clear in the lab sheet that you will need to do this, and we don't expect many tasks to utilise this.

Remember, if you would like to continue receiving this personalised formative feedback from your tutor you can still chose to submit a weekly code-reflection.

As always, we are passionate about making adjustments to the course that improve your learning opportunities and outcomes. We hope this demonstrates that we are always listening to your feedback, and if you have any more suggestions please use the general course feedback form here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?i...

Stay safe and good luck with iteration 1! I've been keeping an eye on the leaderboard, and can't wait to see more groups start to increase their rank when the board is updated.

Best,

COMP1531 Teaching team

COMP1531 | In-person tutorials back on

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 02 March 2022, 08:49:23 PM.

Hi everyone,

Classes will resume in-person for the rest of the week, however if you are impacted by the weather please get in contact with your tutor with the details and we will waiver the in-person attendance report, and make an online-tutorial available to you.

It is possible that an in-person class's tutor may not be able to travel to campus - in this case the tutorial will be moved online, and we will contact you if this needs to occur.

I appreciate everyone's understanding. Please do stay safe and reach out if you need support.

Kind regards,

Jake Renzella

COMP1531 Week 3 Lecture 2 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 02 March 2022, 01:51:00 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

URGENT: All in-person classes tomorrow moving online (Wednesday 2/3)

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 01 March 2022, 09:33:30 PM.

Hi everyone,

Due to the severe flooding affecting Sydney, we have made the decision to move all in-person tutorials scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday 2/3) to instead be taken online.

There will be a call in your tutorial Microsoft Team for the tute/lab at the scheduled time, and your tutor will be in touch to confirm the details as well. Obviously, no changes for online tutorials.

I hope everyone and their family stays safe throughout this, and I’ll be in touch regarding the rest of the week. If you need support please contact me or the university.

Jake

Week 3 lecture now live! Come join now

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 01 March 2022, 11:02:39 AM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

COMP1531 | Welcome to Week 3

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 28 February 2022, 12:23:35 PM.

Hi everyone!

We hope you've had a great weekend. Many of your tutors have said good things about how fun classes has been, and the buzz on the forum has been awesome to see.

Some key updates for you:

• Tutorial + Lab 1 + 2 solutions will be released tomorrow morning (these are usually released sooner but due to the week 1 lab extension we had to delay this just once).
• Help sessions have had a significant increase in the scheduled number of slots. Please see the Help Session schedule on WebCMS, or go to Teams, go to COMP1531 main Team, select the Help Sessions channel, and view the schedule.
• From 12pm on Tuesday morning (week 3) the leaderboard (URL will be released shortly) will be populated with real data that comes from running the code on your master branch against. The automarker will run sometime between 10am-12pm. We'll simply pull your latest code on master sometime in that window (we run groups synchronously, so each group will be run at a slightly different time). Therefore be careful not to merge massive changes into master between 10am-12pm as you might have a different version run than the version you expect to run.
  • The leaderboard does not have any affect on your marks - it is just an indication of your overall performance compared to other groups.

Other items relating to your group project (iteration 1):

• Now that you've seen the week 2 lectures, we expect to see engagement with standups, meetings, task boards, etc from everyone between now and iteration 1 being due.
• Double check your MS Teams channel(s) + Gitlab repo has the correct people in it - contact your tutor if there are any issues.
• Have some fun! Iteration is a light iteration and a chance to learn some core skills.

Week 3

• In week 3 we will continue to learn about python, testing, and other critical elements you will need for the rest of the course. Lectures will be released over the weekend (slow release since changes are being made).
• I won't be making WebCMS announcements for the lectures anymore - the youtube link is always the same, and available here . You can subscribe to the channel, or follow the Outlook calendar I invited you all to.

Happy week 3 everyone,

Jake

COMP1531 Week 2 Lecture 2 going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 23 February 2022, 01:52:48 PM.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

11am Lecture now live:

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 22 February 2022, 10:58:46 AM.

Same link as usual: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

Lab 01, Sydney Trains, and strikes, oh my

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 21 February 2022, 09:45:13 PM.

Dear COMP1531 students,

Quick note first: Regarding Lab01 activities - I understand that there were issues earlier in the week regarding SSH access, etc. In response, there is a 1 week extension on all Lab01 work including formatif submissions. I hope this gives you an opportunity to catch up if you are behind, however keep in mind there is no extension for lab02 so ensure you work on those activities ASAP.

Secondly, as those of you in Sydney are aware, there is an ongoing Sydney Rail strike which may impact your ability to attend in-person tutorials/labs tomorrow or this week. This also affects our tutoring team, and we are working hard as usual to ensure there are no disruptions to our teaching and learning in COMP1531.

In short, If the strike is actioned tomorrow, and:

• you think you will be late to your scheduled class (p erhaps up to an hour late) , I would still encourage you to attend if possible, and we will record a tutorial this week to make available after the fact (might not be your tutorial).
• you will not be able to attend: Let your tutor know, and there will be no attendance penalty.

Regardless of what happens, keep your notifications on. If this affects many students your tutor may wish to turn the tutorial into a hybrid tutorial, so keep an eye on your Tutorial Teams.

Like always, we are here to support and work with you throughout your COMP1531 journey, not against you. I hope these announcements demonstrate that fact :)

I know a rail strike as we are coming out of the worst of the pandemic isn't ideal. Make sure to get in contact with me if you're facing any personal issues, and there are always mental health services available: https://www.student.unsw.edu.au/mental-health-help...

See you all in the Lecture at 11am tomorrow.

All the best, Jake + teaching team <3

Project Iteration 1 Rolled Out

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 21 February 2022, 01:42:56 PM.

Project release

As of this morning, a group project repository was created for each group. The repository is called " project-backend ". You can find your group repository (if you haven't already) on the homepage of gitlab.cse.unsw.edu.au . If you can't find your repository, please post on the forum. If you can find the repo, but you're in the wrong group, please email your tutor ASAP.

Please watch the introductory videos from the project specification - they can also be found here and here .

The most important thing to do right now is to start messaging or emailing your group members and to start reading through the project specification. During your class time this week you can sync up about it and start some early planning, and I would strongly encourage you to organise times to meet later this week or early next week. From week 3 onwards we will be expecting groups to follow a more rigid meeting.

Over the coming days, t here may continue to be slight changes to your group primarily due to students potentially dropping the course before census date. This usually has any material impact on less than 5% of groups. Your tutors will always support you and find solutions that will make things OK :)

Things to keep an eye on for week 2

• Your week 1 lab exercises are due 5pm today - no late submissions
• Your week 2 tutorial + lab is critical for you to spend time with your group and tutor to get stuck into the project
• Help Sessions continue to run in week 2.
• Our next lecture is Tuesday morning, where we'll cover more important content for the project :)

All the best!

Week 1 done + Group Project Specification to be released Monday morning

Posted by Jake Renzella Friday 18 February 2022, 08:11:05 PM, last modified Friday 18 February 2022, 10:03:59 PM.

Hi everyone!

Now that we're wrapping up week 1, it's a great time to summarise the key things that happened this week and give you some pointers for week 2.

If you found week 1 a lot to take in, we've got a helpful getting started guide you can find here .

Week 1 recap

The key things that happened in week 1 are:

• Week 1 lecture slides and recordings can be found on this page .
• Week 1 tutorial and lab content links can be found on this page .
  • Week 1 lab solutions will be released shortly after the deadline (checkout the "solutions" branch on the repos)
• Your project groups were formed during class and the project specification will be released soon.

Week 1 checklist

Here's everything you needed to do for week 1, you can use this as a checklist to make sure you're all up to date:

1. Attend your tutorial/lab and be assigned a project group
2. Make sure you have access to WebCMS/Ed/Formatif/Teams/Gitlab
3. Make sure you have completed your week 1 lab activities (all the core activities + 1 mark worth of a choice activity) and that you pushed these to the repo.
4. Pick one of the labs you found most interesting or challenging, and upload it to formatif with a reflection/question/discussion prompt. More information on how to do that is here .

If you are stuck with any of these, make sure you first try the forum, then a help session, then your tutor, and finally you can email me if those have not helped.

We know there have been some issues with Gitlab this week so we will work with you through any issues.

Project groups

During your week 1 class your tutor will have finalised your project groups in your lab time.

Your tutor should have also added you to a Microsoft teams channel just for your group. Whilst you aren't required to communicate via the Microsoft teams channel we make for you, it's important to note that if teamwork disputes arise or you make claims about other team members contributions later in the course - the only places we will look to for evidence of how you interact with your group are:

1. The project check-ins and iteration demonstrations
2. Gitlab contributions (code you push)
3. Peer reviews at the end of the iteration
4. Any UNSW emails sent between group members
5. Conversations that occur on Microsoft teams

If we need to analyse group communication, we simply won't be able to look at things like Facebook, Discord, Slack, etc, as these are out of our control and are open to tampering etc that make it unfair to consider reasonable evidence. However, anything in your Microsoft teams chat we'll happily take into account. If you're uncertain about anything here or aren't agreeing in your group how to communicate, talk to your tutor in week 2 and they will help you figure it all out! :)

If you don't have your group sorted, or weren't added to your groups Microsoft teams chat, please email your tutor ASAP.

Project release

On Monday morning , a repository called " project-backend " will be released to each of your group repos. You will be able to find your group repository on the homepage of gitlab.cse.unsw.edu.au . Once the specification is released, please watch the introductory videos linked from the document - this is very important .

Things to keep an eye on for week 2

• Your week 1 lab exercises + formatif submission is due 5pm on Monday - no late submissions
• Your week 2 tutorial + lab is critical for you to spend time with your group and tutor to get stuck into the project
• Help Sessions continue to run in week 2, with more times added.
• Our next lecture is Tuesday morning, where we'll cover more important content for the project :)

Other than that, have a great weekend everyone! Look after yourselves and reach out to your tutor if you need any support.

Software Engineering @ CSE | Guest Lecture by Rob Pike

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 16 February 2022, 10:41:24 PM.

Dear COMP1531 students,

We are very fortunate at CSE to be receiving a guest lecture from Rob Pike, titled: “Lessons in Software Engineering”, tomorrow Thursday 17 Feb 4-5pm.

Rob is most known for creating the Go programming language at Google, as well as many other projects. Rob Pike's biography can be accessed here .

Zoom link: https://unsw.zoom.us/j/82904799731?pwd=UHU4RzRYSmN... Password: 733902

The target audience is later year students, however for those of you who can make it I would recommend attending. I will be joining to listen too.

I hope you have all started to settle into your groups. For those of you that haven't yet, don't worry - things will settle soon.

I'll be in touch shortly to announce the release of the project,

Jake

COMP1531 Lecture 2 Live at 2pm

Posted by Jake Renzella Wednesday 16 February 2022, 01:51:07 PM.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdi...

This will be the last announcement for the lectures.

First COMP1531 lecture going live

Posted by Jake Renzella Tuesday 15 February 2022, 10:54:55 AM.

Hi everyone,

The first lecture is about to begin: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiD0gEuEStq3LqNdig9iU7A/live

We will usually start at 5 past. See you all in a few moments.

Jake

Welcome to COMP1531, 22T1

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 14 February 2022, 12:17:42 PM, last modified Monday 14 February 2022, 12:32:30 PM.

Hi everyone!

Welcome to COMP1531 22T1 - Software Engineering Fundamentals. The aim of COMP1531 is help you on your transition from being a solo programmer into being a collaborative software engineer . We have a teaching staff team of about 30 and we're all super excited to get to know you.

It's been fantastic seeing all the introduction posts coming through on the Forum (especially all the cute pets). The term will be over in a flash but we're here to help you through it and have a great time.

Key Points

If you don't lack the time or attention span right now, let us share the most important things:

1. First lecture is Tuesday 15th February 11am-1pm, streamed on YouTube - the link should already be in your UNSW Outlook Calendar, and will be Youtube Live . We will cover the basics of the course in this lecture.
2. Join our Forum (on EdStem) if you haven't already joined it. Introduce yourself, and ask any questions you have.
3. Pay attention to your tutorial time and location . All online tutorials & labs use Teams, and like the lectures these should be in your Outlook calendar shortly.
4. In terms of notes/coursework, tutorials and labs are already up, though lectures will be made available from tomorrow.

About the course

We would encourage you all to take a moment to read the COURSE OUTLINE , because it highlights virtually everything. We will also go through this a little bit in the first lecture.

In terms of assessment, the course has 3 major components:

• 45% major project (9 week assignment in groups of 4-5)
• 20% class mark (made up about half/half by your lab marks along with tutorial attendance & participation)
• 35% exam (mostly practical, some theoretical)

Major Project Groups

A reminder that preferences for major project groups will close at 8pm 14th Feb (tonight) . You can fill out THIS FORM to preference to be in groups with other people. We don't accept late submissions to the form.

Groups will be finalised and passed onto your tutor on Tuesday morning - they will let you know what group you're in during your first lab session.

On Friday evening this week, we will create a Microsoft Teams chat for your group as well as your project repository where you can complete work. So if you haven't already, we would suggest downloading or logging in to Microsoft Teams You must use your UNSW account to log in.

For other questions about your group, we will talk about this in lectures and tutorials this week.

Please remember - it's extremely normal to be slotted into groups with people you don't know, and things have a very high chance of going fine. And for those that inevitably have some difficulties with groupwork, we've spent a lot of time structuring and designing 1531 to be both supportive and fair.

See you soon!

To those studying remotely, our aim is to make sure you feel no less connected and involved with things.

We'll see you on Tuesday morning!

Dr Jake Renzella + the COMP1531 Team

🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀 🚀

Group Preferences by Major Project - due Mon 8pm, 14th Feb

Posted by Jake Renzella Monday 07 February 2022, 03:16:25 PM, last modified Monday 07 February 2022, 03:17:42 PM.

Hi everyone!

We will spare you the more formal welcome and information for later in the week - for now we are hoping to leave you mostly alone to enjoy your last week of holidays :)

We do need to talk about one thing early, though!... group preferences.

As specified in the course outline , COMP1531 has a major project component that is a 4-5 person 9 week group project that constitutes 45% of the course assessment.

Please note that while the course outline is live, various components such as schedules, the forum, etc. are still under development as enrolments are finalised. We will update WebCMS as these come online and keep you updated.

It's a requirement that your group will consist of only people enrolled in your tute-lab (i.e. you are all enrolled in the same class on MyUNSW - not just at the same time, but in the same class). If classes are already full, we also can't over-enrol you (sorry!).

Because we understand many people do this course with people they know, we want to give you an opportunity to preference who you want to be in a group with . To do that, please fill out the form for each person you want to preference . You must make the preference by Monday 14th February @ 8pm . You can preference 1-4 people. You can also preference no people.

We sadly aren't in a position to accept late preferences, so please fill it in prior to then! Preferences are not guarantees that you will be in a group with those people, however, in nearly all cases we make it work with at least 1 of the preferences.

Click here to fill out the form.

If you don't have anyone to preference, or only have one preference, don't even worry! That's very normal. You might hear murmurs from other students that you could end up with a "horror group" for COMP1531. Believe it or not, about 50% of student's don't provide preferences, and we just randomly match students in the same class.

We can assure you that while groups that struggle do exist, they only make up a small numbers of groups. We have structured the course and assessment very intentionally to have processes in place to ensure that if you work hard and follow the rules, that your accomplishments should reflect your mark, even if you end up with a difficult group .

We'll email you all later in the week, and announcements will be made as we finalise the various systems and schedules for the course. Until then, enjoy your week!

We are incredibly excited to work with you all throughout COMP1531, and look forward to meeting you in the upcoming lectures and tutorials.

- COMP1531 Team