Hi Everyone,

Three quick topics:

1. In-Person help sessions started today, with a 12-2 session in Organ lab (this is near physics theatre, where our tuesday lecture is). There will be another f2f help session in Organ tomorrow, along with multiple online sessions. Times are listed on the timetable page.
2. We slightly ran out of time in today's lecture. I recommend taking 20 minutes to watch Zac's 22T3 lecture on Trait Objects which is the content we missed. His coverage of this topic runs from 1hr 20m to 1h 40m -- the last topic, iterators, was already covered today.
3. Just a reminder that next week is flex week: no workshops or lectures will run; but the help sessions will be on as normal!

Best,

~Tom (on behalf of cs6991)

Hi Everyone! Help Sessions will be starting this week, and run every week until Week 10. Note that they will likely not run on public holidays, though we'll keep you updated closer to those holidays.

• Tuesday 12pm to 2pm (Lorenzo and Sai): Online this week, face-to-face weeks 5-10
• Tuesday 4pm to 6pm (Dicko and Dominic): Online weeks 4-10
• Wednesday 12pm to 2pm (Lorenzo and Markus): Online this week, face-to-face weeks 5-10
• Wednesday 6pm to 8pm (Eric and Sabine): Online weeks 4-10
• Friday 2pm to 4pm (Lorenzo and Ningxiao): Online weeks 4-10

Online help sessions can be found in the course discord. The location of face-to-face help sessions will likely be the Help Session Room in K17, but this is TBC.

Thanks,

~Tom (on behalf of cs6991)

The Discord invite URL has been added to the timetable page now. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Welcome everyone to the sixth 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/~cs6991/25T1/. 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 (2025-02-17 18:00:00) -- that's today! The lectures are from 6:00pm - 8:00pm on both Mondays and Tuesdays each week (except week 6, and a long weekend in week 10). 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 Ainsworth G03 (K-J17-G03) on Mondays and Physics Theatre (K-K14-19) 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 Tuesdays, 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
• Aolin Xu
• Brian Li
• Brodie Hales
• Cam Mayhew
• Chris Yoo
• Daniel Chen
• Daniel Field
• Daniel Swords
• Dicko Evaldo
• Dominic Allas
• Eric Cai
• Fritz Rehde
• Hanyuan Li
• James Appleton
• Jonathan Lin
• Kaiqi Liang
• Kobi Beckett
• Lorenzo Grillo
• Markus Bian
• Matthew Kokolich
• Ningxiao Yang
• Ramid Khan
• Sai Nair
• Shrey Somaiya
• Tom Kunc
• Wisesa Resosudarmo
• Xavier Carey

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.

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