Secondary Lecture Topics

• Human Learning: To learn, you should...

Speaking about these explicitly (especially the first type) helps students take charge of their own learning and rely on instructors as crutches much less.

• Get related knowledge in advance
• Expect to exert effort
• Try before being taught
• Review when memory is stale
• Scar in moderation
• Retrieve rather than re-expose
• Interleave topics
• Elaborate rather than repeat
• Study concept over implementation
• Use short feedback loops
• Agile Practices
  • Iterate with rigorous data collection and reflection
  • Estimating is hard
  • Hammer-user vs. shiny-object
  • All code becomes legacy code
  • Debugging is everywhere
  • Data-first vs. behavior-first
  • Start small
  • Style matters early (sadly)
  • Consider technical debt
• git and GitHub Practices
  • init, add, commit, push
  • fork, clone, pull, .gitignore
  • pull, branch, merge, stash
  • branch, pull request, merge
  • Common git workflows (e.g. Gitflow)
  • reset, rebase, filter-branch