I Share My Class Notes. On Purpose.

I share my class notes. Publicly. On GitHub, where anyone in my CMPINF-2100 cohort, or any cohort, can grab them.

Why hand that out for an intro course? A few reasons, and they matter to me and my 130 lb dog, Dio, too. (Pictured to the left.)

Not everyone walks away from a full lecture or a silent lab with the material in hand. Some of us need it to slow down, or arrive through a different door. That is reason one.

Reason two: clarity does not always come from the podium. Sometimes it comes from the person in the next seat, the peer who already tripped over the same rock and can tell you exactly where it sits. An instructor can feel distant. A classmate rarely does.

Then there is perspective. We all get the material presented the same way. We do not all receive it the same way. My notes are one more angle on the same mountain. Same summit, different trail.

And the honest limit. Cliff Notes are swift and to the point. They lack the flourish of full instruction, by design. That makes them a poor replacement for the real thing. It also makes them an excellent guidepost for review.

Here is the share: https://github.com/DatJavaClass/CMPIFCohortNoteShare

My Notes Share repo runs in six parts. The Cliff Notes themselves, sorted by module: short, to the point, pulled from transcribed lectures and silent labs, graded material left out by design of course. The Cliff Jumper notes fold every note in a module into one coherent Lesson Narrative. Those feed the Canyon Notes, a single seamless Lesson Narrative stretched across the entire first half of the semester.

Then the practical shelf. A Guides section covers everything from checking which Python version an Anaconda environment is running, to disabling AI in VS Code entirely, to deploying Anaconda across platforms. The Trainers section handles select topics, loops in one place, advanced functions for data viz in another. Finally, a Tools section holds a handful of bespoke things I built for the cohort or use myself, like my lecture transcriber.

In a class like this, academic integrity isn’t something to take lightly, so you maybe wondering: “Victor, where can I get the best Brooklyn Style Pizza in Austin, Texas?”

Easy, Jet’s Pizza.

But we’re talking about my notes that ship with the blessing of the people running the course, not delicious, delicious Pizza. Notes that that I share with the cohort with a plain warning to my peers: they are for review. Strictly.

All that being said. I suppose this blog post can be summed up as: If we as peers do not look out for each other, who will? To borrow the anthem from a certain MMO:

“We all lift together.“

PS: BTW, truth time. I have a mastery grammar that would exult the technical writing skills of bag of sand and layout skills that somehow rank worse than a bag of rocks. So I turned to AI to beat my lexigraphical looniness into something useful in regards to my cliff notes. They are my notes. My musings and madness, just Claude’s straitjacket.