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Beat the Python

30 April online session on Zoom with Midev

We did an online session from 2pm to 7pm, we explainded: - What, who, why and where - How to install, Jupyter (breveily) - Variable - Input/Outputs - Operations, Comparisons - Str - Types - conditions - loops - lists - dicts

Lessons

  • Don't use an application on production without testing it, Zoom caused me a lot of trouble during session:
  • too many popups/windows during screen cast
  • having to accept people in the waiting room
  • conversation defaults to the people in the waiting room
  • conversation shifts to private message if someone sends me a private messages
  • I'm not sure what I've done but suddenly someone took control over my mouse and start disturbing the session Until I sent him back to the waiting room
  • I couldn't delete the user who took control over the mouse, I don't know why, I clicked on the button so many times without success
  • Don't let them take the mic whenever they want
  • make sure it's open (no waiting room for zoom) or closed for a restricted number of people who can access without confirmation, if this is not possible put someone in charge, otherwise it'll disturb me, people (if they have the possibility to get the mic) start asking to add their fellows ...
  • Fix a time for everything, don't let it open, Example: we'll be giving 10 minutes for this exercice and we'll move on, even if there is someone who didn't understand try not to block everyone for just one person
  • Try hard to get people that have the prerequisites, at least tell them at the begining what are those prereqistiques and if they don't have them, they shouldn't expect to get much and they should consider not blocking others by questions because of that
  • TL;DR: Prepare everything !!! Please everything, execute a dry run of the scenario and see if it could be scaled to the intended number of users you have

Long story: I didn't create the users before, then I wasted a long time to create them: ask them to write their emails to google docs (everyone is late ...), then copy the emails and put them into a text file, didn't find the .py script to create the users, I was obliged to buy it from Ahmed and it costs me 50 dzd as always, the script didn't work, I tired to debug it and I was under stress because there was over 70 participants waiting for their Pravda accounts to be cooked, then create a single user for them all and asked them to create a notebook that have their names, it was a mess, too many notebooks, people use other's notebooks, then remembered they need a directory to git clone "beat-the-python" repository, ask them again to create directory, then they wonder why we did create a file, then a directory, THAT'S BECAUSE IT WASN'T PREPARED ENOUGH, I WAS DECIDING THINGS ON THE FLY. Then when they created the directory, asked them to run a terminal then cd to their directory some directories have spaces, we should've handle that, explaining why and how to fix it, I didn't do it and ended by a bunch of people complaining about command not found error, people don't know how to clone a repository, so they wonder what I did in GitHub ....