Computing Bytes

Using The Missing Semester of Your CS Education, an MIT Course developed for coders looking to sharpen their skills with useful coding tools. Beginning July 2024, biweekly "byte-sized" hour-long meetings cover each lesson and their respective exercises in a peer mentoring format.

In-person meetings (bi-weekly) start July 16, Tuesdays at 3p 75A-M1205 (Crater Lake)

The goals of these meetings are to:

Provide structured time to sharpen and expand your skill set to optimize your growth as a computationalist while at the Broad.
Connect computationalists and software engineers to establish stronger mutual support and perspective.
Identify novel topics and advances in the computational field and bring to our peers' attention approaches to make our code/ projects more robust and innovative

In-person meeting schedule (video lecture group-watch dates & Zoom link)

7/16/24: Course overview + the shell (7/9 video)

7/30/24: Shell Tools and Scripting (7/23 video)

8/13/24: Applying what we've learned (8/6 learning from in-person discussion)

8/27/24: Editors (Vim) (8/20 video)

Cheatsheets: Vim quick reference; Vimium quick reference

9/10/24: Data Wrangling (9/3 video)

9/24/24: Command-line Environment (9/17 video)

Cheatsheet: tmux quick reference

10/8/24: Version Control (Git) (10/1 video)

10/22/24: Debugging and Profiling (10/15 video)

2024 Learner's choice topics revisiting earlier topics

11/5/24: Intro to UGER (#computing_bytes UGER notes)

11/12/24: Version Control (Git) (#computing_bytes Git notes)

11/19/24: Command-line Environment (#computing_bytes tmux notes)

12/3/24: Metaprogramming (watched on 10/29 video)

12/10/24: Computing Bytes Open House (brainstorming for 2025 in 75A-9031, Glacier conference room)

TBD 2025: Intro to Docker (blog post: Docker for biologists)

In-person meetings every other Tuesday starting July 16, 3p in 75A-M1205 (Crater Lake). Meetings do not require registration, and we encourage anyone to join. The course material is not cumulative so attendance at previous meetings is not necessary. Drop in when you can!
Each lesson is associated with a YouTube lecture covering the content. If the topic is unfamiliar, we recommend watching the videos in advance of attending the meeting.
Group-watch Zoom meetings bi-weekly will preceed each in-person meeting. Lecture video previews will start on Tuesday July 9, 3 - 4pm. The Zoom session host will be available to answer questions during and after the lecture viewing. (Meeting ID: 977 5006 2735 Passcode: 064908)
During in-person meetings, we will work through the text and exercises available on the MIT course website (meeting notes).
These meetings are flexible on subject matter, and we encourage you to propose topics for future meetings that you think would be beneficial for the group to tackle together!