Teaching, Winter 2023

by David Humphrey

Tomorrow I'm starting the Winter 2023 term.  I thought I'd give a brief update on what I'm teaching, and my plans.

This term I'm teaching WEB222 (intro to web programming), CCP555 (cloud computing for programmers using AWS), and OSD700/DPS11 (open source project).

The web and cloud courses are going to be similar to other times I've run them.  But, as is always my way, I'm going to do something different this term for the open source class.  I want to get the students to take on two parallel open source tasks:

  1. Maintain and Improve our community blog aggregation platform, Telescope, aiming for a 4.x release
  2. Develop from scratch a new system for students to create and manage custom Domain Names and SSL Certificates, aka, Starchart, and ship version 1.0 by the end of the term.

I'm pretty excited to get started on Starchart.  Seneca's ITS has agreed to connect it to our SSO, and host it when we're done.  This will make it so much easier for courses to add secure endpoints to projects, without adding cost or leaking personal info.  Every Seneca student will have access to the tooling they need in order to secure their servers, web apps, etc.

There's nothing better than starting a new project and getting to pick your tech stack. However, there's also nothing more real-world than NOT getting to pick your tech stack and having to maintain something built by other people.  Having both experiences happen at the same time should be an interesting experiment.

I'm also going to continue to do a mix of in-person (web) and online (cloud, open source) teaching.  Seneca continues to maintain its classroom mask mandate, which is an excellent piece of leadership not seen in many other post secondary institutions (thank you David Agnew). Despite what many in government and the media pretend is going on, the data clearly shows that the pandemic has only gotten worse, and continues to do so:

If you're interested in working on open source code with me this term, feel free to join the Telescope or Starchart project repos, file issues, and submit pull requests.

Until then, please enjoy this amazing photo of a Barred Owl sleeping in the woods that my daughter took over the holidays: