Prof. Stewart Weiss, Department of Computer Science, Hunter College

Weekly Journal/Blog

Every student will maintain a journal for this class, with entries made on a weekly basis. Writing a journal is a way to improve your communication skills. The journal also serves as a record of what you have accomplished in this class. We will use a blog as the medium for these journal entries.

Being able to write well is an important skill in most disciplines, but especially in computer science. People who would look to hire you make judgments based on such things as your ability to speak well and write well. Your ability to communicate in writing and orally is an important part of your skill set. Countless recruiters have said as much to me personally and in their public writings about this. Many software professionals have stated as much in their presentations and writings.

You will be given a public repository for this course-related blog. The fact that it is public implies that anyone in the world can read what is put into this blog. The exact instructions for how to set up the blog are in the README.md file in the blog repository on GitHub that I have created for you. The blog template is in the class organization at

https://github.com/hunter-college-ossd-fall-2019/weekly

Your individual blog is named

https://github.com/hunter-college-ossd-fall-2019/gh-username-weekly

where gh-username is your GitHub account name. The blog repository is set up in such a way that your blog serves as the source code for a web-page hosted on GitHub, using GitHub Pages. For information about GitHub Pages, see What is GitHub Pages. Because GitHub Pages has been activated for this repository, you will automatically have a webpage at the URL

https://hunter-college-ossd-fall-2019.github.io/gh-username-weekly/

where gh-username is your GitHub account name.

Your blog entries must be written using Markdown. It is very important that you make them as professional-looking as possible, and using Markdown will make this possible. Because the blog files are hosted on GitHub, you can use either the standard Markdown syntax or GitHub-Flavored Markdown. Help with Markdown can be found at the following sites:

• Markdown Tutorial
• Mastering Markdown (GitHub)
• Markdown Guide
• Markdown Cheat Sheet

There is directory in your repository

https://github.com/hunter-college-ossd-fall-2019/gh-username-weekly

named _posts. This directory was populated initially with four files, named

• 2019-09-04-week01.md
• 2019-09-11-week02.md
• 2019-09-18-week03.md
• 2019-12-04-week13.md

These files are named in this way for the following reason. A semester in Hunter has 14 weeks and you will need to write 14 separate blog posts for this course. Our classes meet on Mondays and Thursdays, and our first class meets on a Thursday. The first week starts on Thursday August 29 and ends on Wednesday evening, September 4. The second ends on September 11, the third on September 18, and so on.

Therefore, each week, by Wednesday night, a new post should be added to the blog for the week ending that day. The blog post for the first week is created by editing the first file, for the second week, the second file, and so on. You will need to create new files by copying the initial ones and naming them using this naming scheme.

The only exception is that the period from November 21 through December 4 will be treated like a single week since the Thanksgiving holiday falls in it. For this reason, the file for that week has already been created in the _posts directory and named 2019-12-04-week13.md.

The blog post for a given week should be based on the following conditions:

• If an assignment was given that specifically asked for something to be written in the blog for the week, then the post for the week should include whatever was requested in the assignment.
• Whether or not anything was assigned, the post for that week should include a summary of all course-related activity.
• If you have made any contributions of any kind, whether they are to OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, or any software project, those contributions should be added to the contributions.md file.

A Rubric for Assessment of Blog Posts

Blog posts are a component of your grade in the course. I have never found a good way to assign a numerical score to narrative writing, like a blog post. Nonetheless, these posts must be assessed. Therefore, I am using the following ordinal scale for assessing the posts. "Ordinal" means that it is linear but that the numbers have no arithmetic properties other than one being larger or smaller than another. A score of 3 is not three times as good as a score of 1.

Grade	Assessment
3	The post is thoughtful, well-written, well-formatted, satisfies the stated objectives for the posts for the given week, and demonstrates a significant amount of effort.
2	The post is not particularly thoughtful, adequately-written, adequately-formatted, and satisfies the stated objectives for the posts for the given week, and demonstrates a modest amount of effort.
1	The post satisfies the stated objectives for the posts for the given week, but not much more. There is little thought given to it, and almost no effort.
0	The post was not written or was written sufficiently past the week in which it was supposed to be written that it does not qualify as a journal entry.