Just a quick one -- since there were some intermittent instamark issues in the last couple of weeks, and with today's outage in mind, I've also extended your week 8 and week 9 weekly exercises to be due next week Wednesday at the usual time.

Note that there are no weekly exercises in week 10!

Zac

Hey everyone!

I've been made keenly aware of a nasty CSE outage today -- pretty choice timing... It seems like systems and services are back up and running now, but as we have learned from this course, sometimes fixes end up temporary!

To play it safe, I will extend the deadline for assignment 2 to the same time tomorrow. That is, the deadline is now Saturday 16 November 17:00:00. If you have any extensions, they will be applied on top of that extended deadline. The standard 5 day late penalty will still follow after whatever your deadline is.

I will personally be going through the whole cs6991 inbox late tonight. If you are waiting on a response to an email (I've been told our backlog dates to Monday / Tuesday), you should expect to see a response before tomorrow morning.

For the specific case of ELS provisioned extensions, note that those will all be unconditionally approved. We will still respond to your email, but please don't pre-emptively stress about anticipating any question of it!

Thanks all!

Zac

Hi everyone!

Just a short announcement to let you know that we are receiving a large number of emails currently!

We are slowly working through them and will get back to you over the next few days.

If you haven't recieved a reply by Thursday night, please follow up in your original email thread!

Reminder - in order to get faster replies, please email the course account only (cs6991@cse.unsw.edu.au)

• and avoid course staff personal emails (i.e. Zac, Myself, Tom).

Thanks Shrey (~cs6991)

Hi everyone!

The online lecture (making up for Monday's public holiday) is starting in approx. 40 mins at 16:00. You can access the live stream (or the recording afterwards) here: https://youtu.be/SqB9-liBiYI.

There is a live chat available for you to ask questions (or heckle) during the stream. Questions you think of later (or while watching) the recording are most welcome on the course forum :)

Hope to see you there!

Zac

Hi everyone!

We are pleased to announce that help sessions will be starting from today onwards! There will be 4 sessions running each week, for 2 hours each:

• Monday 16:00 - 18:00 [F2F] (Kobi and Kaiqi)
• Wednesday 18:00 - 20:00 [F2F] (Shane and Zac)
• Thursday 11:00 - 13:00 [F2F] (Alex and Vincent)
• Friday 17:00 - 19:00 [Online] (Peter and Tetian)

They will run from this week (starting at 4PM today) all the way until the end of week 10 (including week 6 along the way)!

The F2F rooms are still TBA, so until a further announcement, all four weekly help sessions will be running online.

The online help sessions will take place in our COMP6991 Discord server. Due to a confusion with the invite URL, it has recently changed. If you are part of the online workshop, please use this new URL instead for your ongoing workshops.

Here is the invite URL: https://discord.com/invite/f4hNSpeVpz

Your help session tutors will send a queueing message in the #help-session-general text channel at the start of the allocated time. They will request for you to click on a reaction button on that message to join the queue, and then you can join the help-session-waiting-room voice channel to wait for your turn. When it is your turn, you will be pulled into a private room with a tutor for some 1:1 help!

If you have any questions, please let us know on the course forum!

Cheers,

Zac

Hi everyone!

I've unfortunately spent the weekend and today quite sick. Although I was hopeful I would recover enough to join our lectures this week (or at least replace them with an online live-stream), I've lost my voice and my throat is too sore to communicate effectively.

I have double-checked, and the 22T3 YouTube lectures are good quality covering the same content, so we will defer to those for this week.

• Week 3 lecture 1: link
• Week 3 lecture 2: link

I have timestamped these URLs so they kick off where the actual content begins.

I wish that I could be there presenting it live and answering your thoughtful questions, but these things happen. Maybe later next week I can find some time to hop into a CSESoc voice call to discuss Rust, the course, and answer questions for a couple of hours with you all, to try to (partially) make this up -- well, if that's something some of you would be interested in :)

Please let me know if you have any troubles accessing the make-up lectures, and I will keep a close eye on the "Lectures" category of the course forum over the next week to help discuss and answer any questions that might arise.

Hope you all stay safe and have a great week!

Zac

Welcome everyone to the fifth offering of COMP6991: Solving Modern Programming Problems with Rust! We are so glad to have you all here and sincerely hope you enjoy your time with us here in this course.

First off, some quick administrivia:

Course website

The course website (where you will find this announcement) can be found at https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs6991/24T3/. This will also link you to the course outline, the course timetable, and the course forum. This course does not use WebCMS3 nor Moodle (except to access Echo360 recordings).

Lectures

Our first lecture starts Monday week 1 (2024-09-09 18:00:00). The lectures are from 6:00pm - 8:00pm on both Mondays and Tuesdays each week (except week 6, and a long weekend in week 5). We plan to examine not just Rust code, but hopefully many different programming languages during the lectures and through this set the scope of our studies for COMP6991. I hope to see you there!

The lectures are hosted in-person at F10 June Griffith M18 (K-F10-M18) on Mondays and Colombo Theatre A (K-B16-LG03) on Tuesdays. The lectures will be recorded (into Echo360), Live-streaming seems to be a coin-flip term to term. Hopefully it works this term, but it's sadly not something I have control over.

22T3's lecture recordings are also available anytime here.

Workshops

Through your myUNSW enrollment, you will have selected a workshop class to join each week. It may have shown up as LAB or something similar on the class registration -- this is your workshop. The workshops are held weekly (except week 6) on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Please attend the one workshop that you are enrolled in.

The workshops are heavily practical and involve code design, programming in Rust, and finally reviewing code written and design decisions made, including considering what the experience may have been in other programming languages, etc.

I highly recommend all students to attend at-least your first couple of workshops -- I think you'll find them to be a fun, educational, and social experience, and hopefully you won't need further convincing after that point. If you make the effort to attend them and find this not to be the case, please tell us why and we'll do better!

We have one online workshop stream this term, which will be hosted on the Discord instant messaging / VoIP platform. The course discord URL can be found on the timetable page. Do note that the course Discord is not intended for general conversation -- the CSESoc Discord seems to already serve that purpose well.

Our team

Our teaching team this term consists of:

• Aaron Manning
• Alex Miao
• Daniel Chen
• Daniel Field
• Eric Cai
• Ethan Dickson
• Fritz Rehde
• Hussain Nawaz
• Jaden Lanceman
• Jared Lohtaja
• Kaiqi Liang
• Kobi Beckett
• Matthew Kokolich
• Mitchell Wood
• Peter Derias
• Shane Kadish
• Shrey Somaiya
• Tetian Madfouni
• Tom Kunc
• Vincent Nguyen
• Wisesa Resosudarmo
• Xavier Carey
• Zachary Ecob

Wow, so many tutors this term!! We are extremely lucky to have such a talented and friendly teaching team. Please show your respect at all times to our course staff, who I know for certain are all incredibly excited to be teaching this course for you all!

Weekly exercises

On the course website you will find your first set of weekly exercises has already been released! The due date is Week 2 Wednesday, and this due date structure (week n + 1 Wednesday) will follow similarly for later weekly exercises. These (usually) provide autotests, and are submitted with 6991 give-crate. Weekly exercises will be released weeks 1-5,7-9 (inclusive), bringing a total of 8 weekly sets.

Note that we've also provided some week 0 exercises that are not assessed, and solely exist to help you make sure your Rust toolchain (whether working on CSE or at home) is working correctly, and get you started on some fundamentals.

Weekly exercises have a 0% late-penalty for one week, before immediately increasing to 100% on the 7 * 24th hour. Note that all weekly exercises must be submitted before the end of term (Friday week 10) to be eligible for marks, meaning the final marked exercises (week 9) don't get the full week of a 0% penalty.

Blog posts

In order to help recoup any lost marks from weekly exercises, we are offering "blog posts" for make-up marks! We hope they are a fun and rewarding activity, and you can read more about them here.

Difficulty

We would like to formally recognise that COMP6991 is a challenging course, with a relatively high workload. This will be spoken to further in the lectures, but if you are unsure whether COMP6991 is right for you, please send us an email to the course email address (see course outline).

--

Welcome to the course everyone :)

Zac