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, pandas, or torch.
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 include another link to your blog post as a comment on the Canvas submission. (Unfortunately your revised posts don’t show up as revised in Canvas). The reason for submitting a comment rather than a new submission is so that it is easy for us all to see the feedback that you were previously given and are revising in response to.
© Phil Chodrow, 2025