cs100 - open source software construction

This is a course on how to be a hacker. Being a hacker means a lot of things. It means:

1. wanting to know how and why computers work

2. being efficient / never repeating yourself

3. using and contributing to open source software

4. understanding the edge cases of your software

5. using tools in creative and unexpected ways

6. (occasionally) we combine all these together and break stuff

Hacking is a mindset. I can't force it on you---it's up to you to embrace it. For example, we'll be discussing many new tools in this course: a version control system called git, an editor called vim, debugging tools called gdb, valgrind, and cppcheck, and we'll be going into quite a bit more depth on how to use the bash shell and the Linux operating system. All of these tools are very weird. Using them will make you uncomfortable. At first. But these tools are powerful. Mastering these tools will make you a much more efficient programmer. Once you've mastered them, you'll never go back.

There are two main projects you will work on in this course:

1. Your first four homework assignments walk you through the process of building your own unix shell. This is the biggest project you've undertaken so far. You'll be developing it as an open source project, and you will collaborate with each other at various points.

2. Your last homework assignment is to contribute to the open source community by improving the documentation on a project of your choice. Many of the required readings for this course were written by former cs100 students. If you do a good job on this project, future cs 100 students will be learning from you for years to come!

By the end of the course, you should be comfortable running your own open source projects and contributing to other people's projects.

instructors

position	name	office hours (WCH 110)
lecturer	Mike Izbicki	Tuesdays, 11AM
teaching assistant	Busra Celikkaya	TBD

IMPORTANT: If you want to contact the instructors about the course, you should report an issue via github. We will talk about how to do this in class. This is a system similar to the piazza system you may already be familiar with, but it is more popular for open source software development.

course schedules

Our lectures will roughly follow this schedule. You should do the required readings before class. I will occasionally have unscheduled quizzes to ensure you are doing the reading.

week	date	reading	topics
1	Mar30	Daniel Lemire's how to learn efficiently (recommended; not required)	introduction; using vim
1	Apr01	ESR's all about unix	version control with git
1	Apr03	ERS's about common software licenses; the New Yorker's 30 year retrospective on the GNU manifesto	version control with git
2	Apr06	Paul Graham's what to do in college	version control with git
2	Apr08	Ian Malpass's advice to future software engineers; Linus Tolvalds gets interviewed on why he developed git	version control with git
2	Apr10	Lucas Xu's Makefile tutorial; Alexander Ortiz's how to write a README file; ESR's thoughts on unix documentation part I and part II	syscalls: managing processes (fork,wait,exec,perror); quiz
3	Apr13	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: managing processes (fork,wait,exec,perror)
3	Apr15	bitwise operators; macros	syscalls: managing files (open,close,read,write)
3	Apr17	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: managing files (open,close,read,write)
4	Apr20	William Coates' valgrind tutorial;	debugging tools (gdb,valgrind,cppcheck)
4	Apr22	Jeff Atwood's how to become a better programmer	debugging tools (gdb,valgrind,cppcheck)
4	Apr24	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: managing directories (readdir,stat);quiz
5	Apr27	Ycombinator's startup ideas we'd like to fund and Paul Graham's start up funding	shell scripting: io redirection/piping
5	Apr29	Patrick McKenzie on salary negotiation for programmers (it's long; you don't have to read it all)	shell scripting: io redirection/piping
5	May01	Shubhro Saha's why engineers should write; the economist's good writing style	writing good documentation
6	May04		syscalls: io redirection/piping (pipe,dup)
6	May06	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	syscalls: io redirection/piping (pipe,dup)
6	May08	ESR's classic Master Foo series	shell scripting: control flow with if and for; quiz
7	May11		shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR)
7	May13		shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR)
7	May15		syscalls: signal handling (signal,sigaction)
8	May18		syscalls: signal handling (signal,sigaction)
8	May20	the relevant sections of the syscalls tutorial	shell scripting: environment variables (export,PATH,HOME,EDITOR)
8	May22		syscalls: environment variables (getenv,setenv); quiz
9	May25
9	May27
9	May29	ESR's thoughts on flaws with unix; Poul-Henning Kamp's a generation lost in the bazaar	the flaws of Unix and open source
10	Jun01		case study: hacking the email system and the ioccc.org
10	Jun03		case study: stuxnet and heartbleed
10	Jun05		final quiz

If there's something you want to learn not on the schedule, let me know! We have a lot of flexibility in this course to learn fun things.

The assignments are due on the following days:

assignment	date
hw0	Friday Apr17 @ 11:59 PM
hw1	Friday May01 @ 11:59 PM
hw4 - topic	Wednesday May04 before class
hw2	Friday May17 @ 11:59 PM
hw4 - draft	Wednesday May20 before class
hw3	Sunday May29 @ 11:59 PM
hw4 - final	Friday Jun05 @ 11:59 PM

You will receive -10 pts for each hour (rounded up) that your assignment is late.

grades

We will not be using ilearn in this course. Instead, we will be using a course management system called gitlearn. This software was developed in part by previous cs100 students, and you will be able to earn considerable extra credit by contributing to it. We will be using this system as a case study in bash programming and the unix philosophy. For details, see the gitlearn repo.

cheating policy

Every assignment specifies different collaboration policies. Some assignments will be individual, and some will be in a group. Follow the specified policy exactly!

I take cheating seriously. When I catch students cheating, I give them an F in the class. Then I forward your case to the academic integrity board and recommend that you be expelled from UCR.

All of your code will be run through an automated cheating detector. It is very good. It understands C++ better than you do and can find instances of cheating much more sophisticated than just copy and pasting.