CSC290 Communication Skills for Computer Scientists

Introduce yourself to readers. What is something interesting and 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.

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!

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.

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?

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.

A "public speaker" is someone who speaks in front of a live audience. Who is your favourite public speaker? What is your favourite talk by that speaker? What do you like about their presentations? Most importantly -- what about their presentation structure, delivery, or style that you enjoy?

The speaker does not have to be a computer scientist, but must be someone who speaks in front of a live audience, not just a camera.

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.

This week's blog post will be a technical blog post. There are a few topics that you can choose from:

• Explain the idea of a "Binary Search Tree" data structure.
• Describe the idea of "chaining" in a hash table.
• Describe how to resolve merge conflicts in git

Use a monospace font for code samples and function names, to differentiate them from English words. Remember to keep the audience in mind. In this case, your readers are computer science students and enthusiasts. Also, don't forget the other technical writing guidelines that we discussed in lecture. Here are some example technical blog posts:

• Avoiding git disasters gory story
• Tie Breaking Rounding
• A successful git branching model This is a longer blog post than required, but this blog post was very influential. Many companies use similar git branching models.

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 an email to a potential mentor. 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?

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 4. With:

• 1 point for completion.
• 1 point for structure and grammar.
• 2 point for content, including following the guidelines we described in class.

Write a blog post on your experience building a game with your CSC290 group. What game did you build? What part of the code did you work on? What was your experience working with a group? What was unexpected? What did you learn from the experience? What are you proud of?

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.