Student Initial Setup

1. We will use Slack for most communication and discussion. Please join the course workspace with your UW email address. See Canvas announcement for invitation link.

   • I recommend that you use the standalone desktop/mobile app rather than the web interface

   • To keep things organized, please try to reply to messages in threads (rather than sending responses in the main channel) whenever possible!

2. Create a free Github account if you do not have one already

   • I will distribute materials/assignments using Github Classroom, which requires you to link a Github account.

   • I recommend you apply for the free edu account upgrade, which will allow you to create unlimited number of private repos with unlimited collaborators.

   • If all of this is new, don’t worry, we will walk through basic workflows during the first lecture/lab, and you will become more familiar in the coming weeks.

3. Accept the “Github Starter Course” assignment (see slack for link)

   • This will create a new repo with your username appended (github-starter-course-username), and more importantly, it will allow you to join the Github classroom and the UW-GDA organization

   • Give the README.md in your new repo a skim - it provides a nice, high-level overview of git/Github

4. Log on to the course Jupyterhub (see Slack for link)

   • This is the computing environment we will use for the quarter

   • We will review this interface during lab, but feel free to start exploring

   • If you have trouble logging in, send a message to the #it_help channel on Slack