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Recitation 1: Understand NodeBB - DUE Thursday August 28th, 11:59pm

Asynchronous Recitation

Because this recitation falls before the first day of class, we are having this recitation ONLY by asynchronous. You will complete online, and not attend recitation in person until week 2.

Overview

In this course, we will be building on a piece of open source software, NodeBB. NodeBB is “an innovative forum software designed to meet the needs of modern online communities.”

We will be using NodeBB for the majority of the semester, and we want to start by having you become familiar with the software.

You can find an instance of the software deployed at: Class NodeBB

Unsecured Website

You might see a security warning from your browser when accessing the class NodeBB, since it uses an HTTP (unsecured) connection rather than HTTPS. You can safely ignore this warning and continue, because you will not be entering any confidential and sensitive data on the site. Later in the course, in the software security module, we will discuss in detail what this warning means and why modern systems typically require secure connections.

To help yourself become more familiar with the site, we will ask you to interact with it in several ways.

Activity 1: Create an account

Create a user account using your Andrew ID as the username. DO NOT USE your actual Andrew password. You must use your Andrew ID for us to be able to identify you for assigning participation points. You can then edit your profile to add a "Full Name" and a profile picture. Note that the demo site does not have the ability to send emails of any kind, so please remember your password as it cannot be easily reset.

Activity 2: Introduce Yourself

You should introduce yourself to the rest of the class. Please create a post in the “Introductions” category, which is only visible once you login*. You should include in your introduction the following info:

  • What you want to be called
  • A picture of you (ideally something that will help people recognize you when they see you in class) in the "thumbnail" of the post.
  • A short description (1-3 sentences) about a software project you have enjoyed working on in the past, e.g. during an internship or a large-ish course project.
  • A short summary of why you're taking this course (e.g., because it is a requirement for a specific program and/or because you hope to learn about X).
  • Something that you like to do outside of work, or your favorite restaurant in Pittsburgh. Feel free to embed photos or links in the post.

Activity 3: Reply to another post

After you have introduced yourself, you should reply to at least one other introduction post made by someone else, and comment on or ask a specific question about their prior experience or personal hobby. Try using the "quote reply" feature (look for the double-quotation marks at the bottom-right of a post) to reply to a specific sentence from their post.

Activity 4: Follow up

Login again after a few hours to see if anyone has responded to your Introduction post, and answer their questions, if any.

Introductions are not public

The "Introductions" category is configured so that it will not be indexed by search engines, etc. and are only visible to logged-in users.