Reading 00: Orientation

Everyone:

Welcome to CSE 34872 Programming Challenges, which (as the syllabus states) is a "course that revolves around solving brain-teaser and puzzle-type problems that often appear in programming contests, online challenges, and job interviews". What this means is that we will be studying common data structures, algorithms, and programming techniques that are useful in tackling a variety of problems.

Course Overview¶

Last semester, many of you took the Data Structures course where you learned about the properties and characteristics of different data structures (and perhaps you even implemented a few). The focus of this class, however, is not in the construction of these data structures, but rather their application. This means we will focus on when to use these data structures and algorithms and how to utilize them effectively rather than what they are. In concrete terms, we will not be implementing say a hash table; instead we will use one to solve a variety of problems.

Following the Hands-On Imperative, you will have the opportunity to put the material we discuss in class into practice via a respectful number of weekly programming challenges (three a week). Along with these challenges will be reading assignments to ensure you have a context or background knowledge for what we will be discussing in class. As with last semester in Systems Programming, the reading assignments will be automatically graded.

In fact all of your assignments will be automatically graded by dredd via the continuous integration system provided by GitHub. As you may be realizing during your internship this summer, testing is an important part of software engineering and we will therefore explore various aspects of software development including debugging, profiling, testing, and more throughout the course (if there is time).

Although each class will involve some amount of lecture, there will also be a lot of in-class activities and hands-on learning. Because of this, participation is a component of your grade and you are expected to come to class regularly and on-time.

Fortunately, however, there are no exams in this class. Instead, we will have a final in-class programming contest where you will get to work in groups of 3 (similar to the ACM Programming Contest). Likewise, you will also have to participate in two external programming contests such as those provided by HackerRank or LeetCode.

Task 1: Zoom¶

For all of our class meetings, we will be using Zoom to video conference. Before our first class meeting, make sure you can login to the Zoom system and access our meeting link:

https://notredame.zoom.us/j/96051200559

Task 2: Slack¶

For communication outside of our meeting time, we will be using Slack, specifically the #cse-34872-su21 channel:

https://nd-cse.slack.com/messages/cse-34872-su21/

There is a class mailing list, but most day-to-day communication (including office hours and homework help) should take place on Slack.

Task 3: GitHub¶

All of your work will be submitted to GitHub using git. Your final task is to setup your GitHub repository by doing the following:

1. Sign-in or create a GitHub account if you do not already have one.

2. Fork the class assignments repository from the following template:

   https://classroom.github.com/a/UaSJmI9j

   This will create a private cse-34872-su21-assignments-$USERNAME repository under your own account and linked to the nd-cse-34872-su21 organization.

3. Once this is done, you can clone your git repository to your local machine (or the student machines:

   $ git clone https://github.com/nd-cse-34872-su21/cse-34872-su21-assignments-$USERNAME.git
   

   Please update the README.md file to include your name and NetID so it is straightforward to identify your account.
   Note: If you have not done so already, you should consider setting up SSH Keys on GitHub to enable password-less pushing and pulling.