CS133: Professional Skills

This website provides an overview of Leo Riviera's (u2014020) lab diary, which documents and reflects on the seven labs completed, as well how this material has engaged, challenged and enabled professional development.

Lab Diary Entries

Lab 1

Linux Essentials

A simple introduction to Linux, touching on the command line, files, directories and permissions and developing a website using HTML and CSS.

Lab 2

Web Standards and Version Control Software

A deep dive into web standards compliance, including HTML5 and CSS3, and using Git version control software to track, sync and back up code.

Lab 3

Linux Processes and Scripting

A look into how users can view and manage processes in Linux, as well as how to use the Bash scripting language to write and run simple programs from the terminal.

Lab 4

Advanced Scripting and Regular Expressions

A more complex lesson on scripting in Bash and using basic regular expressions to interact with the command line and filesystem.

Lab 5

Building a Script

A lab which combines material from the lectures and labs to test knowledge and build useful script applications that can be run from the command line.

Lab 6

LaTeX (Part One)

A lab which focusses on creating presentable academic content using LaTeX, including sectioning and layout, and displaying figures, maths and algorithms.

Lab 7

LaTeX (Part 2)

A lab that puts my LaTeX skills to the test, focussing on citation and referencing.

Review Questions

Which aspects of these labs did you perform strongly on?
The work I produced over this course has several strenths, namely
  • The web version of my lab diary is W3C compliant and responsive on mobile and tablet devices.
  • The LaTeX version of my lab diary is easily navigable, with clearly laid out content and a clickabletable of contents.
  • A record of new commands and tags encountered during each lab, alongside their arguments and functions, provides an easy-to-understand reference which supplements the man and texdoc documentation.
  • codeblocks and /texttt tags created a distinction between commands and prose in the weband LaTeX versions of this diary, allowing for simpler reading and easier reference.
  • Summaries at the start of each lab allowed me to clearly reflect on how the content considered hasaided my professional growth and development.
What aspects of these labs did you find difficult?
The weak points I identified and addressed included
  • Some content of the webpage, namely the navigation bar and copyright footer, were replicated across pages. Other elements, such as the titles, used similar styling but the inner HTML was slightly changed. The replication across several pages meant it would be extremely difficult keep these blocks of code consistent across pages if changes to the HTML or styles were necessary. Although this could be mitigated by using a static site generator, such as Jekyll, or a framework, such as React, it was deemed unnecessary for this small project.
  • For some labs, I found it difficult to strike what I thought was the correct balance between brevity and detail. To solve this, the summaries at the start of each lab discuss the lab’s content briefly.
  • Initially, the styled version of the website was bland and unattractive. It was also difficult to usestyles split across several subdirectories. Therefore, I used a CSS library, Tailwind CSS, to improve its appearance and eliminate the need for individual stylesheets.
How does this course link to other degree material?
The knowledge gathered from this Professional Skills module will be useful for the remainder of my degree course.
  • The machines at the Department of Computer Science (DCS), as well as my personal computer,is Unix-based. Refreshing my knowledge on how to interact with and manage processes on Unixsystems will allow me to use them more effectively.
  • I have selected Web Development Technologies as a module for the second term. Therefore, the concepts refreshed in Lab 2, including writing HTML and CSS, web standards compliance andusing Git to track and sync work, will be important to apply this module.
  • Understanding Linux processes and scripting, as well as regular expressions, will allow me interact more efficiently with a computer using the command line. This will be useful for headless envi-ronments, including Unix servers, continuous integration and continuous deployment, automatedtesting and web scraping.
  • Learning how to write, format, cite and compile LaTeX documents, touched on by Labs 6 and 7,will prove useful for improving the quality of the technical reports I produce for other modules.