End of Quarter

A small checklist of things to do as you wrap up the quarter!

Table of Contents

Reflection

This is not directly related to infrastructure, but it’s helpful to formally reflect on how the quarter went. There’s a broad gamut of reasonable questions, but here are ones that we suggest:

  • from student feedback, what were:
    • the highlights of the course; how can we preserve these?
    • pain points; out of these, which are immediately actionable?
  • for TAs and teaching staff:
    • what was easier than expected? harder?
    • what systems are working well, and what aren’t? are these systems fixable?
    • what do you wish someone told you at the beginning of the quarter?
  • for each new strategy/program/”thing” we tried this quarter:
    • did it achieve its objective? what went well?
    • what didn’t go well? how much of this is because it’s the first time it’s being done, versus an endemic problem?
    • should we continue this next time? why or why not?

Updating Documentation

This is a great time to skim through all of the documentation we provide, and make sure that it’s up-to-date before you hand it off to the next TAs! This includes:

  • the playbooks (and other content) on this site!
  • repository READMEs (especially for the barista one, which is never re-made)

This is a crucial step in preserving knowledge across iterations of the class, which is especially important given TA turnover!

Archiving Repositories

Once the quarter is in and the grades are submitted, it’s a good idea to archive all the repositories related to each quarter. Usually, this is:

  • the course website, e.g. spring-23
  • the project starter, e.g. spring-23-project-starter
  • the (public) autograder, e.g. spring-23-autograder