TA Adventures

For some reason, I managed to become a TA for VG151, Accelerated Introduction to Computers and Programming. There are a few possible reasons. One of my guesses is that the professor is also a Linux user.

Our course infrastructure is almost exclusively FOSS:

  • Video conference: Zhumu (Chinese Zoom), non-FOSS
  • SCM: git, FOSS
  • Git forge: self-hosted Gitea, FOSS
  • Instant messaging: self-hosted Mattermost, FOSS
  • Online judge: self-hosted JOJ, FOSS
  • Canvas, FOSS[citation needed]
  • MATLAB, non-FOSS
  • C/C++ Compiler: gcc, FOSS
  • Build system: GNU Make and CMake, FOSS

On 2022-08-19, I received an email from the undergraduate education office (UEO) that I got the offer. Naturally I went "woo-hoo party timeeeee". Later I met my colleagues, two sophomores and one junior, plus another junior whose title is "volunteer assistant" (thanks Mack!).

On 2022-09-13 the semester began with a campus lockdown due to a positive case of Covid. As a result all lectures that afternoon switched to online mode, just like the previous summer semester except now I'm at school rather than home. This sucks ass. This might be reversed if circumstances go the good way, or it just might stay.

Update: we switched to "hybrid mode" in late October, and then offline only (save for international students). I went to VG151 classroom twice, it was pretty populated.

Update: whoops, back to online.

Anyway, enjoy my compilation of blogposts on life being a TA:

VG151 came to an end in December 2022.