CSC290 Communication Skills for Computer Scientists

Introduce yourself to readers, so that the readers can remember you and will know something unique about you. What are your interests? What are your goals? How can other people help you, and what kind of help can you offer to other people? You should discuss one goal you have related to CSC290.

The structure of your blog post is very important. Avoid answering the prompt questions one by one. Instead, think about the message of your blog post and structure your blog post depending on what you want to get across.

Be careful about revealing personal information on the internet. You can opt to write about yourself anonymously. However, having an online presence can help you be known amongst other students and the wider community. Being "known" can be immensely helpful for your career!

Describe your best project: the project you are most proud of. What did you do? Who did you work with? What was challenging? What made the project worthwhile? What impact did it have on other people? What did you learn? Why are you proud of the project?

Your project doesn't have to be programming related. Also, you don't have to answer all prompt questions. An in-depth answer of a few questions makes a better blog post than enumerating answers.

Be clear and specific. One of the worse things you can do is talk about your project in generalities, or talk only about the circumstances surrounding the project rather than the project itself.

PS: one of the required reading is a blog post titled Writing is Thinking. If you are stuck, or don't know what to write, start there.

This week's blog post will be a technical blog post. There are a four topics that you can choose from. Please do not write a blog post on any other topic. The possible topics are:

• Binary search tree
• Hash table
• Linked list
• Bloom filter (This is a probabilistic data structure that you probably haven't seen before, but is quite widely used in industry)

If you'd like, you can include code snippets to clearly express specific ideas. If you choose to use code, use a monospace font like Courirer New or Monaco (why is that?). However, do not take screenshots of code and post it as an image: an image is difficult/impossible for people with visual impairments to read with their screen readers. Making content accessible is an important part of communication, especially for computer scientists.

Remember to keep the audience in mind. In this case, your readers are computer science students and enthusiasts.

Here are some examples of technical blog posts that computer scientists wrote:

• Tie Breaking Rounding
• Salting and stretching a password
• String Interpolation
• Python Lazy Merge

Since this week is reading week, this blog post will be a little more open-ended than the others. Quite a few students mentioned in the pre-course survey that reading is one of their hobbies, so this blog post is an opportunity to explore books about the "softer" side of computer science. If you prefer to keep it simple, you can write your blog post on Chapter 1 of "The Pragmatic Programmer", which is required course reading and is available on Quercus.

Choose one of the books below, or another non-political book about programming, computer science, software development, software design, or project management.

• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
• Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
• The Mythical Man-Month
• Don't Make Me Think
• The Design of Everyday Things
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (this is a great book, but will take you more than one week, and is not for the faint-hearted)

Read at least 1-2 chapters of the book. Write a blog post about why you chose the book, what you read, and what your reactions were. What was interesting about the book? What ideas did you think were profound? Do you agree with the author?

Do not assume that your readers have already read the book you chose. Instead, start with a summary describing what you read, so that the rest of your blog post makes sense.

The structure of your blog post is very important. Avoid answering the prompt questions one by one. Instead, think about the message of your blog post and structure your blog post depending on what you want to get across.

Most importantly, have fun!

This week's "blog post" isn't a blog post at all. Instead, you will put what we learned about emails to good use, and write a cold email to someone who could help you professionally. You should not publish this email on your blog.

First, think about how someone with more experience could help you right now. Is there a company you are looking to join? Are you looking for a summer internship? Identify ways that other people can help you.

Next, look on the internet (for example on LinkedIn) for someone who could help you achieve what you are looking for. This could be someone who currently works at a company, a startup founder that might give you an internship, or a graduate student working with a professor whom you would like to do research with.

Avoid famous people. Instead, choose people who are likely to respond to you, including people whom you have connections to.

Finally, write an email to this person. You could ask them for advice over coffee, for possible job openings, or anything else appropriate for your current situation.

You are not required to actually send this email. However, you will be doing the hard work of drafting it, so why not? Students have received responses from recipients in the past, and had successfully scheduled coffee meetings to discuss internships.

For this week only, submit a PDF file on MarkUs containing both (1) information about the recipient of your email and why you chose him or her, (2) the email subject and body.

Grading will be out of 5. With:

• 1 point for including the description of the person, and why you chose them.
• 1 point for completing the email.
• 1 point for including good content (and the right amount of content) in the email.
• 1 point for structure, including following the guidelines we described in class.
• 1 point for grammar/mechanics.

For this blog post, we'll be critical analyzing this survey result released by StackOverflow:

Developers Who Use Spaces Make More Money Than Those Who Use Tabs

Write a blog post that briefly summarizes the article and its methodology, and a short review of the methodology. The formatting and the writing should be similar to the critical review, but with a few key differences:

• Your blog post will be shorter. Keep your summary brief, and focus on 1 or 2 critiques or insights.
• You do not need to cite any additional sources. The citation can be in any reasonable format that links the reader to the article that you are reviewing.
• Your writing should be more conversational and less formal, but still professional (e.g. the author of the original study should not feel personally attacked or offended by your critique).

PS: If you don't understand the statistical terms mentioned in the article (regression, p-value, etc), that's okay. You can focus on different aspects of the methodology.