8. Getting Started Coding

Note

Staff Advice: Design a solution before starting the implementation. Students consistently agree that design is harder than implementation across multiple iterations of this project. A faithful implementation of a faulty design will not earn you many points.

See additional suggestions in Staff Advice.

Follow these steps to get started with the coding portion of Project 2.

  1. Install Golang version 1.17 or newer.

  2. Complete the online Golang Tutorial The tutorial can take quite a bit of time to complete, so plan accordingly. The tutorial is a helpful tool that you may end up referencing frequently, especially while learning Go for the first time.

  3. Accept the Project 2 GitHub Classroom Invite Link (available on Piazza). At this step, you may receive an email asking you to join the cs161-students organization.

  4. Enter a team name. If you’re working with a partner, only one partner should create a team - the other partner should join the team through the list of teams.

  5. Clone your personalized repository. It should be located at: cs161-students/fa21-proj2-{team_name}.

  6. In the client_test directory of the checked out repository, run: go test. Go will automatically retrieve the dependencies defined in go.mod and run the tests defined in client_test.go. It is expected that some tests will fail because you have not yet implemented all of the required functions.

  7. Best practice when using git is to commit small, logical units of work regularly. This makes it easier to revert related changes if something goes wrong. Additionally, push your changes from your local checkout to your GitHub repository frequently to back up your work in case something happens to your local machine, and to share your changes with your partner (if you have one).