/helpdesk

Primary LanguageEmacs Lisp

Helpdesk @ Concurrency and Parallelism Laboratory

Here is the helpdesk of the Concurrency and Parallelism Laboratory at KAIST School of Computing. We will try to answer your questions as far as we can!

Specialty

We have expertise on Rust, Coq, and concurrent programming.

  • To study Rust, we strongly recommend you to start with "the book". The entire book is worth reading. Read the book, implement some Rust code on your own, and ask any questions you've got to have.

  • To study Coq, we strongly recommend you to start with Software Foundations Volume 1: Logical Foundations. You can clone this mirror. Don't skip (too many) exercises---they are the essence of the book. You can learn how to install Coq and setup your IDE here.

  • To study concurrent programming, we strongly recommend you to take KAIST SoC CS492A: Concurrent Programming.

How to ask questions?

Please search for the issue tracker and see if your question is already answered. If not, ask your question in the issue tracker.

The content should be clear enough so that we can easily help you. Don't ask the solutions to the exercises. Don't upload images of codes. Format your content using GitHub's Markdown manual. Especially pay attention to properly formatting code.

Please contribute to the community

Your participation would be greatly appreciated. Please watch this repository, and if there are some questions you can answer, please do so. Your help will make the helpdesk much more scalable.

Advice for lab members

What is Research?

"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing," Wernher von Braun

The defining characteristic of research is everything---from motivation to methods to evaluation to goal---is tentative: in the middle of doing research, you don't know what will be the end result. As a consequence, a researcher will suffer from:

  • Failure everyday. You don't know what you're doing, so you'll fail almost always. To deal with the frustration from such failures, you should be mentally tough enough to tolerate such frustration. If successful, from time to time you will be able to understand or design small things, which accumulate to a paper and a thesis.

  • Changing plans. You don't know what you're doing, so your goal will be changing as you make progress on your project. So any long-term plan is destined to be significantly revised. Thus you should think of the goal as a ever-moving target, the current version being just the best possible approximation of the actual end result. Your goal should be neither too concrete nor too abstract: if too concrete, it will not be resilient to the revision; if too abstract, it will not guide your research.

Communication

All communication (except for Mattermost and face-to-face meeting) is asynchronous: the receiver is not required to reply promptly. Mattermost chat in work hours is supposed to be synchronous: the receiver is requested to reply promptly.

Registration

When you first come to the lab, please do the following instructions:

  • Create {firstname}.{lastname}@kaist.ac.kr email account.
    • You can add "additional account" in mail.kaist.ac.kr > Settings > My Account > Additional account.
    • If it is already taken, add a number at the end of the id, e.g. {firstname}.{lastname}07@kaist.ac.kr
  • Send your email address and GitHub ID to jeehoon.kang@kaist.ac.kr.
  • Your GitHub ID will be invited to kaist-cp organization.
  • You'll get {firstname}.{lastname}@cp.kaist.ac.kr G Suite account.
  • You'll get a Mattermost account in https://cp-service.kaist.ac.kr/mm.

Email

  • Use {firstname}.{lastname}@kaist.ac.kr email account for all work emails.
  • Forward all {firstname}.{lastname}@kaist.ac.kr emails to {firstname}.{lastname}@cp.kaist.ac.kr and check emails in Gmail.
  • Configure the Gmail account to send from {firstname}.{lastname}@kaist.ac.kr.
  • Write proper formal emails.
  • Try to reply within 12 hours.

Calendar

  • Use {firstname}.{lastname}@cp.kaist.ac.kr account for calendar and other G Suite applications.
  • If you want to have a meeting, just directly invite the others in Google Calendar. In the invitation, write the purpose of the meeting.

GitHub

  • All work should be done in the kaist-cp organization.
  • If you want to create a new repository, ask Jeehoon.
  • Get email notification for mentions and issue/PR comments.

Mattermost

  • Instant messaging service at https://cp-service.kaist.ac.kr/mm.
  • Try to reply promptly in work hours. (No need to reply in other times.)
  • At the beginning of each work day, briefly state what you'll do that day at this channel.

Face-to-face meeting

  • Before asking for a meeting, write down a short meeting agenda and share it.

  • In the agenda, clearly state the purpose of meeting. It can be, but not limited to: (1) reporting the progress, (2) asking questions/opinions, or (3) just chatting.

  • Try to be direct, top-to-bottom, and conclusion-first (e.g. not "A, so B, so C", but "C, because B, because A").

  • If you have multiple things to discuss, enumerate them at the beginning of a meeting for better planning of the meetings.

First things to do

  • Use the following devices (IMPORTANT: no password should be written here. It's a public repository.):

    • WiFi: kaist-cp at Rm. 4441, Bldg. E3-1, KAIST

    • Printer: HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M479fdw; 10.12.255.2 in the WiFi network; AirPrint protocol

    • Server: ssh -p<port> <g-suite-id>@cp-service.kaist.ac.kr

      • port: 11000, 11001, 11002
      • password: <g-suite-password>
      • e.g. ssh -p11000 jeehoon.kang@cp-service.kaist.ac.kr

    • Desktop: login with your G Suite account

      • Configuring Hangul input method

        1. Alt+F1 and search "Region & Language" > Input Sources > + > Korean > Korean (Hangul)
        2. Alt+F1 and search "Region & Language" > Input Sources > English (US) > Remove
        3. You can switch between Korean/English input method by pressing shift+space.

      • If you want to install additional packages, make a PR to this repository, and after the PR is merged, run /usr/bin/install-packages.

  • Create your website at https://cp.kaist.ac.kr/{firstname}.{lastname}.

    • Fork our website repository and clone it.
    • Install dependent libraries and run a local server to test by following commands: bash # Make sure Ruby is installed. $ bundle install $ bundle exec jekyll serve
    • Add your meta information(name, status, github ID, etc.) to people.yml.
    • Make a new file {firstname}.{lastname}.md under the directory _people/.
    • Write your concrete information on the {firstname}.{lastname}.md. I recommend you refer to _people/jeehoon.kang.md.
    • Make a commit, push it and PR.

  • Make sure you know how to use Git. FYI, this tutorial is a good introduction.

  • Read how to read papers and give talks by Dr. Derek Dreyer:

  • Study Rust or Coq depending on your research interest. See https://github.com/kaist-cp/helpdesk/#specialty for more details.