6.171 Fall 2003 Calendar

• Monday, August 11: email survey due
• Friday, August 15: students informed of acceptance into 6.171; accepted students should be prepared to begin (a) reviewing potential client projects, and (b) preparing computer hardware/software
• Tuesday, September 2: accepted students email ben@mit.edu with the URL of their up and running development server (ideally demonstrating connectivity to the relational database)

  The Horror Begins

• Thursday, September 4: first class; required elements of a sustainable online learning communities, intro to the RDBMS
• Tuesday, September 9: serialization and concurrency control, optimistic and pessimistic locking, pitches by prospective clents (slides)
• Thursday, September 11: pset 1 (Basics) due; projects assigned to teams; code review of Basics pset, Dave Mitchell talks about roles on teams
• Tuesday, September 16: data modelling (airline example), improving query performance with RDBMS B-tree indices (figure)
• Thursday, September 18: User Registration and Management exercises due. Presentations by teams, code review and discussion. Look at Planning exercises completed by those teams who've completed them. Dave Mitchell talks about risks and process.
• Tuesday, September 23: Planning exercises and Exercises 1-3 in Content Management due. Team presentations and discussion. Data model normalization and Third Normal Form (make sure you've read the normal form sections in the Content Management chapter and maybe this SQL for Web Nerds chapter; we'll be taking apart this table for supporting an MP3 sharing service)
• Thursday, September 25: Look and feel criticism of public Internet sites and farther-along teams.
• Tuesday, September 30: All exercises in Content Management due, including client sign-off. Each team presents status and plans.

  October

• Thursday, October 2: All exercises in Software Modularity due. Team presentations of their design decisions and documentation.
• Tuesday, October 7: Students complete exercises in Discussion chapter up to but not including the usability test. Dave Mitchell returns to wrap up his project management lectures.
• Thursday, October 9:
• Tuesday, October 14: Students complete all exercises in Discussion chapter except execution of the refinement plan. Class time devoted to discussion of usability test results and whether the numbers could have been predicted from the page flow and HTML designs.
• Thursday, October 16: three-person teams choose either the wireless (mobile) or VoiceXML chapter exercises and present one; two-person teams are off the hook for both chapters!
• Tuesday, October 21: Students present their refined discussion forum systems. Class time devoted to presentation of the refined systems.
• Thursday, October 23: Students complete all exercises in Scaling Gracefully chapter. Class discussion of scaling exercises, ideally starting with each answer being presented by a separate team.
• Tuesday, October 28: Exercises 1 and 2 from Search due. Discussion of team designs for full-text search.
• Thursday, October 30: All exercises from the Search chapter due. Cesar Brea returns to help people prepare for the Planning Redux sessions with their clients.

  November

• Tuesday, November 4: Planning Redux exercises due. Team presentations of their work and plans for public launch.
• Thursday, November 6: Take-home mid-term exam handed out (an individual rather than a team project).
• Tuesday, November 11: no class (Veterans Day holiday)
• Thursday, November 13: Mid-term exam due. Class time devoted to discussion of exam questions, answers, and implications.
• Tuesday, November 18: Distributed Computing exercises due.
• Thursday, November 20: guest lecture by the Sapient folks behind OpenCourseware's content management system
• Tuesday, November 25: Metadata exercises due; Ben Adida lectures on security
• Thursday, November 27: no class, Thanksgiving holiday

  December

• Tuesday, December 2: User Activity Analyis exercises due (these are easy); the Empirix folks come in to talk about their performance results
• Thursday, December 4: final presentations I to Beth Marcus (entrepreneur), Doug Robinow (entrepreneur/lawyer)
• Tuesday, December 9: last class; final presentations II to Ellen Cram (Microsoft), Brian LaMacchia (Microsoft), Bob Metcalfe (inventor Ethernet, founder 3Com, Polaris Ventures)