6.171 Spring 2006 Calendar

• Monday, January 2, 2006: email survey due from students
• Friday, January 13: 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
• Friday, February 3: accepted students email the TA with the URL of their up and running development server (ideally demonstrating connectivity to the relational database)

  The Horror Begins

• Tuesday, February 7: first class; required elements of a sustainable online learning communities, intro to the RDBMS
• Thursday, February 9: serialization and concurrency control, optimistic and pessimistic locking, pitches by prospective clents (slides)
• Tuesday, February 14: pset 1 (Basics) due; projects assigned to teams; code review of Basics pset
• Thursday, February 16: data modelling (airline example), improving query performance with RDBMS B-tree indices (figure)
• Monday, February 20: President's Day
• Tuesday, February 21: no class; MIT on Monday schedule
• Thursday, February 23: 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.
• Thursday, February 23, 7:30 pm in 1-150: Optional get-together for students interested in Internet application startup companies, run by Shimon Rura (a mentor)
• Tuesday, February 28: Planning exercises and Exercises 1-3 in Content Management due. Cascading Style Sheets by Julie Melton. 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)

  March

• Thursday, March 2: Look and feel criticism of public Internet sites and farther-along teams.
• Tuesday, March 7: All exercises in Content Management due, including client sign-off. Each team presents status and plans.
• Thursday, March 9:
• Tuesday, March 14: All exercises in Software Modularity due. Team presentations of their design decisions and documentation.
• Thursday, March 16: Students complete exercises in Discussion chapter up to but not including the usability test. Dave Mitchell returns to wrap up his project management lectures.
• Tuesday, March 21:
• Thursday, March 23: 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.
• March 24-April 3: 6.171 spring break

  April

• Tuesday, April 4: 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!
• Thursday, April 6: Students present their refined discussion forum systems. Class time devoted to presentation of the refined systems.
• Tuesday, April 11: Students complete all exercises in Scaling Gracefully chapter. Class discussion of scaling exercises, ideally starting with each answer being presented by a separate team.
• Thursday, April 13: Exercises 1 and 2 from Search due. Discussion of team designs for full-text search.
• Tuesday, April 18: Patriot's Day holiday continues
• Thursday, April 20: All exercises from the Search chapter due. Cesar Brea returns to help people prepare for the Planning Redux sessions with their clients.
• Tuesday, April 25: Planning Redux exercises due. Team presentations of their work and plans for public launch.
• Thursday, April 27: Take-home mid-term exam handed out (an individual rather than a team project).

  May

• Tuesday, May 2: Mid-term exam due. Class time devoted to discussion of exam questions, answers, and implications.
• Thursday, May 4: Distributed Computing exercises due.
• Tuesday, May 9: Metadata exercises due; Ben Adida shows up
• Thursday, May 11: User Activity Analyis exercises due
• Tuesday, May 16: final presentations I, panelists: Jon Hirschtick, Jamie Goldstein; sequence: East Coast Aero Club, Underground Guide, iCompact.com
• Thursday, May 18: last class; final presentations II; panelists: Patrick Sobalvarro; sequence: SolidWorks, atMyPad, Texas 4000, East Asian Bibliography