Missing Semester

This course will be hold by (alphabetical ordering, see below for emails!) Tobias Faller, Dr. Mathias Fleury, Florian Pollitt, and Tobias Seufert.

This course is oriented to the MIT/SAI “Missing Semester” and presents many useful tools. None of these tools requires a separate course, but each is useful, especially for manipulating text (e.g., log files, automating and evaluating experiments, …). A typical bachelor thesis will involve:

programming (with an IDE and a proper text editor setup)
analysing logs (for performance, statistics)
writing in LaTeX
producing plots

All these topics are covered in this lecture. More formally this course covers the following topics, among others:

Linux and desktop environment
text editors - Using Git - Shells and command line
Draw graphs in programs

The number of participants is limited (as we run the course for the first time) and HisInOne is taking care of it. We assume that master students already know most of the content, but they can attend too.

You can find a sanitized version of slides on our Nextcloud.

NEWS

Changes compared to previous iterations

We will not stream again (but will provide last year’s recording and a new recording for the parts that changed a lot).
The course is actually not meant for master students (who probably have already learned most of it anyway). In 2023, it was still possible. Since that, it was not possible.

Registration

For the registration we rely on HisInOne (including the selection process). We have been told that this time exercises and lecture would be synchronized, so only one registration is required. The registration dates are defined by the University, not by us (last year it was 25.09.2023 and will be similar this year, please see https://www.tf.uni-freiburg.de/de/studium-lehre/termine – we do not control the webpage and we do not know when it will be updated).

The course is (supposed to be) limited to 140 students (because we correct ourselves), but did not reach the limit during the WS24

Organization

Mode: lecture is in-person (with interaction), but also streamed and recorded with Zoom (without interaction)
Lecture & Exercise Class: To be confirmed (actual information: Wednesday 10 to 12 and Thursday 12 to 2pm)
Credits: 6 ECTS
Dependencies: none
Language: german
Responsible (for general questions): Dr. Mathias Fleury
Email (for everyone): To write everyone
Teaching by (alphabetical ordering, do not use this list to write people!): Tobias Faller, Mathias Fleury, Florian Pollitt, and Tobias Seufert.
Exercises will be done on the fly during the lecture depending on the subject.

Most communication is done through Ilias.

Why this course

The entire idea of this course is to show you tools and things that exist. In 2023 we got the feedback that many people would have like the course as a bachelor course! So come and watch it.

Grading

The course will be composed of two parts: the studienleistung (the weekly exercises) and the prüfungsleistung (a project at the end that will have to cover several themes, with a deadline two weeks after the end the course). More details will be given later (around christmas).

Project

The project will be fully announced later in the semester (probably as mentioned in the program, see below). You can have a look at the 2024 version, which will be similar to the 2024 version.

Temptative Planning

NB: the lecture happens on Wednesday and Thursdays, but it easier for us to reason in semester weeks (as we plan multiple lectures).

The biggest difference to last year is that we moved LLM earlier.

Week 1 to 6: Linux and Git (from the GUI down to the terminal)

Week start	Themes
Mo 13. Oct.	Introduction
	Light intro to markdown + git
	Github + TF account

	Ilias + suchen
Mo 20. Oct	Linux [CRITICAL-EXERCISE]
	Emacs
Mo 27. Oct.	emacs + LSP

Mo 3. Nov	LLMs
	[CRITICAL-EXERCISE]
Mo 10. Nov	Terminal (mit pipe)
	TF account for ssh / how much printing left / ..
Mo 17. Nov	Git (hooks, CI, …)
	Git exercises [CRITICAL-EXERCISE]
Mo 24. Nov	Slack for Git

Week 7 to 11: Automation

Week start	Themes
Mo 1. Dec	emacs with vim keybindings / or vim directly
	astrovim exercises
Mo 8. Dec	Python to extract data
	Exercise [CRITICAL-EXERCISE]
Mo 15. Dec	VSCode (including plugins, remote)
	+ exercises
	Project (15min)
Christmas
Mo 5. Jan	Docker

Week 12 to 15: High level again

Week start	Themes
Mo 12. Jan	Plots (jupyper notebook)
	pyplot [CRITICAL-EXERCISE]
Mo 19. Jan	LaTeX
Mo 26. Jan	LaTeX
Mo 2. Feb	Feedback + project

The Lehrevaluation is the 6th not-all-required exercise and you must pass 4 of the 6 not-all-required exercises.