Missing Semester

This course will be hold by (alphabetical ordering, see below for emails!) Tobias Faller, Dr. Mathias Fleury, Bernhard Gstrein, 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

8 october: we are activaly rejecting master students on HisInOne. It seems that the course was allocated with wrong conditions in HisInOne.
25 September: master students cannot get ECTS for this course (unless you failed last time), EDIT 8. october: except for some Lehramt cases.
25 September: adding programm
23 September: it seems that the course is also opened for masters. We are not sure yet what we will do with the master students, but we will for sure take as many Bachelor students as possible before taking master students.
17 September: we do not know why the course is not visible on the Vorlesungsverzeichnis, but it is taking place
06 September: added information on registration
18 July: The course will be in German even if (most of) the material is in English

Changes compared to previous iteration

The course is actually not meant for master students (who probably have already learned most of it anyway). Last year, it was still possible. This year it will not be (except if you failed the course).

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. We are not sure if we will reach that limit or not (last year we did not have that many bachelor students).

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
Responsible on paper (for information only, he is only forwarding email to the person above! use the link to open your email client): Prof. Dr. Armin Biere
Email (for everyone): To write everyone
Teaching by (alphabetical ordering, do not use this list to write people!): Tobias Faller, Mathias Fleury, Bernhard Gstrein, 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.

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 ws23/project.html, which will be similar to the 2024 version.

Temptative Planning

Week 1 to 5: Linux and Git (from the GUI down to the terminal)

Week	Themes	Exercise	Homework about that content
14. Oct.	Introduction
	Light intro to markdown + git
	Github + TF account

	Ilias + suchen + einführung
21. Oct	Linux	at home	CRITICAL-EXERCISE
	Emacs
28. Oct.	LSP	on Monday	Not-All-Required (1/6)
free Thursday
4. Nov	Terminal (mit pipe)	during lecture	Not-All-Required (2/6)
	TF account for ssh / how much printing left / ..
11. Nov	Git (hooks, CI, …)	during lecture
	Git exercises		CRITICAL-EXERCISE
18. Nov	Slack

Week 6 to 11: Automation

Week	Themes	Exercice	Homework
25. Nov	vim/helix + treesitter	during lecture	Not-All-Required (3/6)
	vim exercises
2. Dec	Python to extract data		CRITICAL-EXERCISE
	Exercise
9. Dec	VSCode (including plugins, remote)		Not-All-Required (4/6)

16. Dec	Docker
Christmas
6. Jan	Plots (jupyper notebook)		CRITICAL-EXERCISE
	pyplot

Week 12 to 15: High level again

Week	Themes	Exercise	Homework
13. Jan	LaTeX	during lecture	Not-All-Required (5/6)
	Project presentation?
19. Jan	LaTeX	during lecture
	LLMs?
27. Jan	LLMs (+define project here?)		CRITICAL-EXERCISE

3. Feb	Feedback + project

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