Notebook Tips

Notebook Purpose

Your notebook has two purposes:

1. Provides documentation that helps future students reproduce/build off of your work.
2. Helps instructors evaluate your efforts throughout the semester.

As such, each entry should state the weekly goal at the top, with progress/results underneath.

The goal can be the same for up to four weeks. After four weeks, you should have either moved onto something else (new goal), or take a step back and try to attempt a new approach.

The progress/results should be detailed enough that a future student can reproduce or build off of it in a reasonable amount of time. Most (if not all) entries should contain graphics/code snippets to help in this aspect.

Notebook Tips

• Your notebook should focus on what you have done that week, not what the team has done.

  • Meeting notes should be kept in a different notebook.

• Each entry should focus around one or two pictures/graphs, diagrams, tables, and/or code snippets.

  • Do not to post screenshots!

• If you want to include code/terminal output, use markdown code blocks

  • If the code block is long (more than 10-15 lines), consider condensing it into psuedocode (LLMs are pretty good at this).

• Terminal output/logfiles should also be put into blocks

• Code snippet example:

def naive_password_checker(password):
    GOLDEN_PASSWORD = P455W0RD

    if len(password) != len(GOLDEN_PASSWORD):
        return False

    for i in len(password):
        if password[i] != GOLDEN_PASSWORD[i]:
            return False
    return True

• Bash command example:

hayden@cps-vip:~$ echo "This is a bash code snippet"

• Terminal output example:

This is a bash code snippet

• Include links to code when helpful.
  • links should not replace embedded code snippets or pictures. They can (and should) exist simultaneously.