Expectations for Blog Posts

The following expectations apply to all submitted blog posts in CSCI 0451.

Writing

Blog posts are computational essays.

Please write in thoughtfully composed English paragraphs.
- Provided that your intended meaning is unambiguous, spelling and grammar will not be major feedback items and will not be the determining factor about whether revisions are encouraged or expected.
You should explain all code displayed in your blog post, in such a way that your reader can understand what you are doing.
- A corollary is that you should break large code blocks up into smaller ones so that you can explain your approach.
Please make sure that your writing also responds to all prompts in the body of the blog post assignment.

In this course, writing is a fundamental part of the learning process. Blog posts that have fully correct technical solutions but which are missing major written components will generally receive feedback of an M (which means “I think you could learn more on this assignment”) rather than an E.

Tip: Quarto offers some neat functionality for marking up your code. Code comments can also be helpful, but do not replace text.

Code

Your code should be careful, concise, efficient Python.

Unless otherwise stated by the prompt, all your code can be included in your blog post itself (it is not necessary to create a separate module).
Whenever possible, for-loops should be minimized in favor of efficient vectorized operations in numpy and pandas.

Computational Outputs

All plots must have labeled axes and legends when appropriate.
Use of captions and cross-references is encouraged.
When showing a visualization, every aspect of that visualiation should be discussed in the accompanying text. If an aspect of a visualization is not sufficiently important to include in your text, please remove it!

Text Formatting

Mathematical content should be typeset using Quarto’s included MathJax syntax. “alpha x y” is not appropriately typeset; instead, typing $\alpha \times y$ produces the mathematics $\alpha \times y$.
All code should be in code blocks (Quarto will usually take care of this for you). Inline code can be rendered using backticks (`code here`), which results in text that looks like this.

Submission Instructions

Simply submit a URL to your online blog post in Canvas!

To submit a revision, just make another submission to the same assignment on Canvas.