Fall '26 Week 2
Resources
Video Script
00:00 Hello and welcome to the week two announcements for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So hopefully you’re getting started working on Lab 1. Lab 1 is going to be due, I believe, next week sometime. So make sure you’re getting that worked on. For grading in this class, we do, for a lot of these labs, we’re going to do an in-person grading via Zoom. So the way this works is to get your lab graded. You schedule a time slot via our Calendly links. Please look at Sicheng’s Calendly link first than mine. I will get Sicheng’s posted later today so that it’s on the syllabus and on the homepage. If Sicheng is available, I’d prefer that you schedule with Sicheng first. If not, feel free to schedule with me. What you’re going to do is you’re going to make snapshots of your VMs and have those booted and ready to go when you connect to the Zoom. And then I or Sicheng is going to walk you through the things that we need to see on the rubric. You should know how to show us those things. So if we ask you, show us how all the user accounts that you created or show us that this user account is in this group or show us the permissions for these files, you should know how to do that. The lab has all of that in there.
01:09 We’ll be prepared in the background. We can direct you if we need to. But make sure you have everything ready to go. Make sure you’re ready to demonstrate it. And then you’ll just join the Zoom, share your screen, walk us through everything. It usually takes about five to 10 minutes if everything’s working. And as long as you can demonstrate you did the lab, you’ll get all the points. It’s pretty straightforward. If things don’t work, we’ll do our best to try and get you some partial credit. We may have to take some additional time to look at stuff. The other thing is if something is really screwy, Sicheng may refer you to me. That’s totally fine. We’ll work through that. But as long as you get your lab actually graded before the due date, you won’t have any problems at all.
01:36 So other big thing coming up in this class, we’re going to have five discussion sessions where I bring in a guest speaker to talk about their experiences industry. The full schedule is now posted on the homepage on Canvas. You just scroll down to find the section on discussion sessions. The way those work is you need to submit an assignment to ask two questions for the person that’s coming in. I will post their bio. I’ll post their LinkedIn link. Try and write those questions specific to that person. It’s really kind of disappointing when I get a question of, you know, what’s one thing you wish you would have done differently in your career? It’s a fun question, but try and come up with something that’s unique and interesting to their background and to what they’re coming to present about. So you’ll submit two questions before. And then the second part is you can either attend the live session on Zoom, which I would really prefer if you can make it. And then during that, you get to ask one of your questions. And as long as you attend live and ask the question, you’ll get your credit.
02:28 If you’re not able to attend live or you attend, but you don’t ask a question, afterward, you can watch the video and then I’ll have some prompts to respond to just to show that you watched the video and actually got the content that we have in that discussion. So hopefully that makes sense. It’s pretty clear. It’s on the Canvas homepage as well. This is going to start September 16th. We have our first one on September 16th at 2.30, which is Seth Galitzer. Seth is a former computer science sysadmin. Now he works at the engineering IT services as their sysadmin. So Seth’s going to come in. We’ve got some really cool speakers. We’ve got a couple of repeats from previous semesters, and I’ve got three new speakers this year that I think are going to be a lot of fun. So make sure you watch for that.
03:08 Other big thing to remember is to get help in this class, please remember to email the cis527-help email address. That goes to both me and Sicheng, so you’ll be likely to get a faster response. You can also post an Ed discussion. There will always be a mega thread for all of these labs and Ed discussion and it’s a great way to see if your question has been asked before. That’s really helpful for me just to keep everything in one place. And then of course, if you want to schedule with me, you can schedule with either Sicheng or I using our Calendly links that will be on the Canvas homepage and on the syllabus. I’m switching from the Microsoft booking tool back to Calendly. So if you find the booking tool, it will still work, but I’m going to switch back to Calendly because I’m frankly kind of frustrated with Microsoft offering. So I’m going to switch back to Calendly because I’m frankly kind of frustrated with Microsoft offering. So I’m going to switch back.
03:48 So that’s really all I’ve got for this week. Normally in this class, you’ll probably see announcements video like this every Tuesday. I may skip a week video. There’s nothing new to add, but generally I’ll try and put out a video every Tuesday. So if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Otherwise, good luck this week, and I will see you all again next week.