Coding Environment Setup
If you want suggestions on how to set up your coding environment, please watch this video or
read the “Setting Up Your Programming Environment” post on piazza.
If you want Alexa’s 20-minute “Assignment 1 setup” video, please go here. The setup for
assignment 1 is almost identical to that of assignment 2 so there will not be a new video.
● We made this document just for you, full of tips to help you complete your programming
assignments faster and better! We will add to it as the course progresses, and you are
welcome to add your suggestions as well.
● Good for getting a quick response, since it goes to a wider audience than email.
● Good for viewing questions that other students have. Chances are, if you have the
question, so does someone else. If tagged correctly (e.g. “a2” for assignment 2), you can
easily see all questions relating to a particular subject.
● Good for general questions that don’t divulge your approach (e.g. “Am I allowed to use
standard JCF data structures in my solution?” “Does anyone else get this strange “file
not found” error when submitting?” etc.)
● Good for asking specific-to-you questions of the course staff, which you can ask
“privately” on piazza. This gets you the benefits of a wider audience yet keeps your
personal details private to course staff. (You can and should also contact Alexa this
way.)
● Good for quick questions that may have some back and forth.
● Good for clarifications.
● Good for “tips and tricks”.
● Not good for debugging sessions. The person holding the student hour may have many
people waiting, and as such cannot spend 20 minutes helping you debug, unfortunately.
They may give you a push in the right direction, then ask you to go back in line while you
work with that push, while they help someone else.
● Good for light social interactions and commiseration.
● Please remember that this discord is an official class discord, and as such you should
keep your behaviour “professional”. Please be respectful. Jokes are great, just not at the
expense of an individual or a specific group. Disrespectful behaviour (intentional or not)
will be met with our zero-tolerance policy (removal from server.)
● This is not a good place for asking questions, as the course staff will be spending most
of their time monitoring piazza. Piazza has a better system for tracking open questions
and answers, and so it is more time efficient for the course staff to spend their time
there instead of discord.