To: brlewis@alum.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: brl for IAP
In-reply-to: Your message of "01 Aug 2000 09:34:19 EDT."
             <nm94s55w1es.fsf@kindness.mit.edu> 
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 2000 00:57:47 -0400
From: Alex <xela>

Hi Bruce---

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you.  I've been out of town
a lot this summer (the O'Reilly conferencee, then IETF) and am still
digging myself out.

> What would you think about making the brl class be part of a larger
> series taught by different people.  Somebody could have a miniature
> install-fest of helping people get apache-ssl up on their private
> machines.  Somebody else could teach an HTML class in which people make
> static pages that mock up database-driven apps they'd like to write.
> Somebody else could teach a class on MySQL or Postgresql.  Finally, the
> brl class would tie it all together.
> 
> What do you think?

It would certainly be cool by me --- the main part of my job is to
provide logistical support for people who want to teach, and to
encourage people to teach.  But another part of it is to try to make
sure people don't bite off too much --- and I think trying to
orchestrate all of that together would be quite a lot.  To take these
elements in order of difficulty:

There will certainly be HTML classes during IAP --- I.S. has been
teaching it under the Athena Minicourses rubrick in recent IAPs, if
nothing else.  But I suspect most of the audience for a brl class
would be MIT undergrads who long since learned HTML by osmosis --- and
I wouldn't be surprized if most were recent 6.001 alumni intrigued by
the sheer coolness of using scheme this way.  In short, I would trust
grounding in HTML to take care of itself.

I probably have someone to teach an SQL class.  In this community, it's
not unreasonable to expect that people will pick up the details of
whatever particular server they end up using.  

I'd love to find someone who'd be interested in giving a workshop on
installing apache/ssl.  Right off I don't know a good candidate, but
I'll ask around.  Do you know someone?  This is the thing on your list
that most clearly needs to be at least discusssed as part of teaching
brl per se: people need a walkthrough (though probably not a workshop)
of the steps to get a running brl environment, *and* an introduction to
what they can do with brl once they have a working system.

(Aside:  actually, while I'm thinking of it, what servlet engine do you
recommend with Apache?  (For a very low-load environment where open
source is much prefered, if those are factors that affect what you'd
recommend.)

Overall, I guess what I'm saying is I wouldn't worry overmuch about
putting together a coordinated series leading from "don't know HTML" to
"able to leap tall databases with a single sexp".  The people I expect
to be interested in it for IAP can connect the dots for themselves. I
would tend to suspect that what they'd care more about would be seeing
brl well exercised; ideally you'd work through an entire real (albeit
small)functioning system --- a database schema and all the code for
interacting with it --- working up in complexity.

But bear in mind that the above is only advice --- again, I'm here to
profide logistical support to people who want to teach classes.  What
to teach, and how to teach it, are yours to decide.

Take care,

---Alex 

Carl Alexander                                                    KD7GUR
------------- MIT (where Alex hangs out):
xela@mit.edu      Course VI (sometime special student)    SIPB (prospective)
                  Mitgaard ("honorary mold")    MITSFS    LSC (night worker)
                  http://web.mit.edu/~xela
------------- Work (where they call me 'Carl'):
carl@terc.edu     Sr. Systems & Network Administrator, TERC
                  http://www.terc.edu
