First Impressions of Using Stack Overflow for Education in a Computer Science Bachelor Programme

Community Question Answering (CQA) platforms like Stack Over- flow enable gamified and moderated community-driven knowledge creation. We report on our experiences of introducing Stack Over- flow in our Computer Science BSc programme and explore whether these platforms can (1) reduce the workload of lecturers in answer- ing questions in large-scale classrooms, and (2) create a community of learners in the large-scale setting of ∼1600 students.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Software EngineeringComputer Science & Engineering-Teaching Tea

Delftse Foundations of Computation

Delftse Foundations of Computation is a textbook for a one quarter introductory course in theoretical computer science. It includes topics from propositional and predicate logic, proof techniques, set theory and the theory of computation, along with practical applications to computer science. It has no prerequisites other than a general familiarity with computer programming.Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/Distributed SystemsAlgorithmic

Nebu: A topology-aware deployment system for reliable virtualized multi-cluster environments

Petabytes of data are processed daily by distributed applications built upon Hadoop and MongoDB. A significant fraction of these applications use cloud infrastructure to cope with this vast amount of data. Commercial clouds use virtualized environments, but most distributed applications are designed around the idea that they run on physical hardware. When this is no longer the case, guarantees for an application’s reliability and performance no longer hold. To remedy this issue, we design a powerful and comprehensive system called Nebu. Nebu is able to provide information about the physical topology of the cloud to the distributed application and is capable of automated virtual machine and application deployment. Nebu performs these tasks without depending on any single distributed application or virtual machine manager. Instead, Nebu provides efficient APIs that make it easy to provide compatibility with many popular distributed applications and virtual machine managers. We develop Nebu as an open source project using modern software engineering practices. In particular, we use the agile development method Scrum in combination with the Kanban scheduling system. We apply iterative API design through the use of RAML and supporting UML diagrams. Because no effective methods for testing distributed applications have been developed, we use both unit testing and manual testing. We also apply automated regression testing through the use of continuous integration. Because there are no formal guidelines on how to validate distributed applications for the kind we investigate in this work, we develop Nebu and perform real-world experiments with multiple distributed applications using an enterprise multi-cluster infrastructure. These experiments show that Nebu enables applications to give guarantees about reliability without degrading their performance. To increase Nebu’s usability, we provide extensions that offer compatibility with the distributed applications Hadoop and MongoDB, and virtual machine manager VMware. Both the system and the extensions to the system are developed in an enterprise environment. This holds good promise that Nebu will be adopted by open-source communities, as well as the industry.PDSElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc