FA24 Syllabus

Daniel Weiner, Sophie Strausberg

Course Staff

Name	Role	Office Hours	Location
Daniel Weiner	Instructor	Monday 4:30-5:30pm	Goldwin Smith Hall 236
Thomas Vignos	TA	Monday 4:30-5:30pm	Goldwin Smith Hall 236
Skye Slattery	TA	Monday 4:30-5:30pm	Goldwin Smith Hall 236
Joshua Dirga	TA	Tuesday 3-4pm	Hollister 110
Daisy Chang	TA	Tuesday 3-4pm	Hollister 110
Aayush Agnihotri	TA	Thursday 2-3pm	Goldwin Smith Hall G20
Ashley Herrera	TA	Thursday 2-3pm	Goldwin Smith Hall G20
Kevin Biliguun	TA	Thursday 2-3pm	Goldwin Smith Hall G20
Cindy Liang	TA	Friday 3-4pm	Hollister 110
Nicole Qiu	TA	Friday 3-4pm	Hollister 110
Sophie Strausberg	Instructor	Friday 3-4pm	Hollister 110

Schedule

This schedule is tentative and subject to changes to Cornell's Fall 2024 academic calendar.

Lectures are every Monday and Wednesday from 7:30 PM to 8:20 PM in Olin 255, and each week's lectures will be split into two parts: a concept-based overview of the week's topic, followed by a live implementation demo of the same topic.

Additionally, there will be a project assignment every week, which will typically be due on the following Monday. You can find the lecture recordings on our YouTube channel, for you to rewatch as you wish.

Lecture Dates	Topic	Project	Project Due Date
10/7, 10/9	Routes	Reddit	10/21
10/16	(Optional) Git	N/A	N/A
10/21, 10/23	Databases	Venmo (Basic)	10/28
10/28, 10/30	Relational Databases	Venmo (Full)	11/4
11/4, 11/6	Abstractions	CMS	11/11
11/11, 11/13	Containerization	Dockerize CMS	11/18
11/11	Hack Challenge Kickoff	Hack Challenge	11/17
11/18, 11/20	Deployment	Deploy CMS	11/25
11/25	Images	N/A	N/A
TBD	Hack Challenge Finale	N/A	N/A

Enrollment

You can enroll yourself into the course like any other on Student Center upon passing the pre-test and submitting the application (see Apply to Take the Course). This is a 2-credit S/U course, however, we permit students to enroll for 1-credit for the purpose of avoiding a credit overload petition. All students are expected to do the same work, regardless of the number of enrolled credits.

Weekly Assignments

Programming assignments and weekly feedback forms are due on Mondays at 11:59 pm and submitted on CMS. Students will have 6 total slip days throughout the semester to submit assignments without a grading penalty. After all slip days have been used, there will be a -10% penalty per day. No late submissions will be accepted after the Saturday following the normal submission deadline.

Because of the slip day policy, no extensions will be granted.

Each assignment will have three optional challenges to take your understanding further.

• Tier I challenges are designed to be low difficulty, simple extensions of the application (estimated time: <1 hour).

• Tier II challenges are medium difficulty extensions that require more forethought for a successful implementation, but are by no means out of reach (estimated time: <2 hours).

• Tier III challenges are high difficulty extensions which will often require outside research and will teach you things that we do not have time to cover in this course.

We highly encourage you to reference demos, attend office hours, and ask questions on Ed discussion. Along with submitting assignment source code, you will be required to submit a text file (README.txt) where you can freely comment on the week’s lecture, assignment, or anything else. You will also fill out a short questionnaire which helps us quantify feedback for improving the course.

Grading

As mentioned earlier, this is a 2 credit S/U course and grading will be calculated as shown in the table below.

Submission Deadline: Monday 11:59 pm Late Deadline: Thursday 11:59 pm Late Penalty: -1 point penalty per day. We will not accept homework after the late deadline. Safety Net: 6 total slip days for the semester, up to 3 can be used per assignment.

Item	Weight
PA1 - Reddit	10
PA2 - Venmo (Basic)	10
PA3 - Venmo (Full)	10
PA4 - CMS	10
PA5 - Dockerize CMS	10
PA6 - Deploy CMS	10
Final Project	30
Weekly Surveys	5
Attendance	5
Total	100
Passing Score	70

Hack Challenge

All AppDev courses finish with bringing members from iOS, backend, and design together to put what you’ve learned to the test and build your very own application. All students are welcome to submit app ideas and teams up to four will be formed to bring the idea to life. Leading up to the Hack Challenge, the backend course will focus on deployment so that your mobile apps can connect to a live backend running on Google Cloud servers. It goes without saying that the majority of students find the Hack Challenge the most rewarding and fun part of the course!

Academic Integrity

As with any other course at Cornell, the code of academic integrity will be enforced in this class. While we encourage you to collaborate with other students, all code that you submit must be written by you (and although a great method for learning, pair programming does not abide by our standards of students submitting their own work). We also encourage using the internet to learn more about backend development, but again, any code you submit must be written by you.