Async

In the real world, developers read documentation; they do not watch lectures. Consequently, this course does not have traditional lectures. Instead, we provide a weekly technical brief.

You are expected to treat this material as you would a technical specification document at work: read it, implement the examples, and arrive at the meeting ready to build.

The Weekly Cycle

The course operates on a strict weekly cadence to ensure the synchronous sessions remain productive.

The Technical Brief and associated materials are released on Monday, a week before they’re due. You review the material and external documentation over the week. You complete the “Entrance Ticket” assignment by Tuesday at 11:59 PM. You use these skills during the Wednesday synchronous session.

The Technical Brief

Each week, you will receive a document covering the “theory” required for the upcoming Sprint. It is designed to be consumed actively, not passively. It consists of three components:

• A concise written explanation of the core concept (e.g., “What is a Git Branch?” or “How does Pytest discovery work?”).
• Links to the official manuals for the tools we are using (e.g., Polars, Pixi, GitHub Actions). You are expected to learn how to read and navigate these primary sources.
• Code snippets and command-line examples. You should not just read these; you should type them into your terminal to build muscle memory.

The Entrance Ticket

To ensure that teams are not blocked by basic syntax errors during the Sprint, every student must complete an individual checkpoint assignment before class. The Synchronous session assumes you have done this work. We will not explain “how to write a loop” in class; we will be using loops to build data pipelines. If you skip the Async work, you will be unable to contribute to your team during the Sprint, which will negatively impact your Professionalism grade.