Hello,

I am following your course and I am stuck at some points. I would like to ask whether the solutions in each chapter exist somewhere?

Thanks for this great lecture!

In Security and Cryptography lecture, sha1sum was used for demonstration.

But I found shasum worked in my zsh shell instead of sha1sum.

I tried my bash shell where sha1sum also didn't work.

This screenshot show the wrong word.

I don't find the meaning of this word trixy, so I guess maybe it is a typo.

The link in the lecture notes on editors from 2020 is broken. It links to https://github.com/missing-semester/missing-semester/blob/master/2020/files/vimrc but should link to https://github.com/missing-semester/missing-semester/blob/master/_2020/files/vimrc the difference being that a _ character should proceed 2020.

In Editors (Vim) course,

why suggest to put plugins in ~/.vim/pack/vendor/start instead of ~/.vim/pack/git-plugins/start(from vimawesome.com) or ~/.vim/bundle? What is the difference between these paths?

And how the vim notice these plugins? Or how does the vim know where to find these plugins?

Lecture 8 should not be called "metaprogramming" which is a well-established term that refers to a technique that treats programs as data. It seems that lecture is mostly about building software, so why not call it that?

As I'm reading through the lectures and find typos or mistakes, I'd like to help improve the Missing Semester and let you know about them. How do you prefer contributions?

• Issues
• Large-ish PRs (one per lecture)
• Small PRs (one per mistake)
• Some other way?

Thanks for the great content in this series.

In the "Debugging" lecture, it would be useful to add netcat or telnet to the list of tools to use when debugging network issues. As well, listing dig or nslookup and host or getent hosts would be helpful in cases of debugging DNS issues.

A couple of examples where these are used from my experiences as a software engineer:

• working through issues with firewalls in public cloud or on premise
• debugging VPN setup issues

I'd like to make my own website based off the Missing Semester Jekyll theme. What license is the source code under? I know the content is CC BY-NC-SA.

Thanks!

Since you guys are using kramdown for markdown files i would suggest a small enhancement:
Add {:target="_blank"} to all links so people don't exit the lecture page while clicking on the link.

Thanks for this beneficial lecture!

I found it was tough for newbies like me to install the linter plugin for Vim which was mentioned in the exercise of Debugging and Profiling.

Maybe elaborating on this topic a bit more in future would be helpful, as this feature looks very useful.

Some tool and resource suggestions:

Git:

• tig is really nice as a tool between using git on the command-line and using a GUI. It's especially helpful for visualizing the commit graph of smaller repositories (tig --all) and even has a periodic-refresh feature (refresh-mode=periodic combined with refresh-interval). The latter could be used to show the current commit history, e.g. in a tmux split, while working with the repository. I only recently discovered the auto-refresh feature and thus didn't really use it so far, but the alternative variant having watch git log --graph ... in a tmux split, alongside watch tree .git, was quite nice when explaining Git.
  Caveat: relatively dense keyboard mapping, i.e. simply pressing random keys might not be the best idea ...
• The Git Parable as background reading
• Think like (a) Git for a relatively short overview of various topics, including branching and merging

Data wrangling:

• visidata also is a TUI tool, but looks very helpful for working with tabular data in a terminal and seems to be a tool which is worth having heard of. Unfortunately I cannot say much about its reliability so far since I also discovered it quite recently.
  Lightning talk, website, tutorial
  Caveat: the use of yaml.load() in the stable version may lead to code execution when a malicious YAML file is loaded (issue; also depends on the pyyaml version in use)

I think that the last part of the Q&A undersells the merits of Safari. Firefox excels for privacy reasons as you mention, but so does Safari. The lower memory footprint and battery life usage are benefits of Safari that aren't mentioned.

Metaprogramming, as the lecture correctly points out, is generally understood to mean "programming programs that write programs", and is (or should be) considered a field of AI. I'm currently exploring that specific topic, so using it for other things will lead to confusion.

For the Build Systems/Continuous Integration lecture, why not call it Periprogramming, from the ancient Greek for "around", ie the things we do around programming, instead?

missing:~$ cd ..
missing:~$ ls
missing
missing:~$ cd ..
missing:~$ ls

should presumably be

missing:~$ cd ..
missing:/home$ ls
missing
missing:/home$ cd ..
missing:/$ ls

The shell tools lecture references zsh-history-substring-search, but I believe it's referring to zsh-autosuggestions. zsh-history-substring-search enables UP/DOWN to page through command history, but zsh-autosuggestions enables the dynamic autocomplete.

It might be helpful to link to both plugins!

Hi there,

I am Kanisorn from Thailand. I learned this course and I think this is really good content here. I would like to ask that I will create the Thailand CS Missing Semester and re-create contents to Thai.

I plan to use re-create content because I love the concept of Missing Semester but we might modify or create by our own style. All is free, serve on GitHub Pages via http://docusaurus.io/. And here we have fews Thai contributers to help to create/validate Thai contents. We will have more or less lesson from your current course.

I am here because I concern about the license. Would I need to strict on the same license here.

Thanks.

Hello,
I've forked the repository in order to translate the lectures into Persian (Farsi) language:

• Mirror: missing-semester-fa.github.io/
• Repository: https://github.com/missing-semester-fa/missing-semester-fa.github.io

I hope to be able to translate one lecture per week.
Please add it to the list of translations.

Thanks!

As described in the Remote Machines exercises, including the line
RemoteForward 9999 localhost:8888
in your .ssh/config fails silently on my machine.

In particular, with this setup, even running netstat -tln from the host machine does not show anything listening on localhost:9999.

However, if you change the .ssh/config to:
LocalForward 9999 localhost:8888
Everything works perfectly.

Can the RemoteForward be correct? I've been trying to dig into this for hours and cannot find any way to make it work, even with significant manual trials using ssh -R

I have been struggling with this exercise for a while to see how git commit -C could be used to sign a git commit since according to its man page, it takes an existing commit object, and reuse the log message and the authorship information (including the timestamp) when creating the commit.

Isn't git commit -S the command used to sign a git commit? Worked that way when I tried at least. Not sure if I overlooked something or is it a typo maybe?

Noticing that this section within the "Debugging and Profiling" lecture (https://missing.csail.mit.edu/2020/debugging-profiling/) isn't working:

For example, executing echo -e "\e[38;2;255;0;0mThis is red\e[0m" prints the message This is red in red on your terminal.

I provided an alternative command which was taken from here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/57559997/4962467

The first command is from the lecture and the second command is the solution from Stack Overflow:

Am I inputting the lecture command into my terminal prompt incorrectly?

Questions 4 and 5 in the Data Wrangling lesson with OOTB WSL. I was able to get it up and running using the instructions here. It may be worth noting this for future versions for ease of use,

Can Swift Playgrounds be mentioned as an example of an interactive and exploratory programming environment in the notebook programming section of the potpourri page? I think macOS (and iPadOS) users might find this interesting and useful.

In Shell Tools and Scripting lecture, Q4 of exercises states in hint

check -d flag for xargs

This doesn't work on macOS as it is a GNU extension. Had to figure this out. The alternative is using -print0 option on find and -0 option on xargs.

Thank you guys, this is such a great course! It is even more helpful to self-taught engineers like me. so I really want to contribute and what I can do is to translate this into Chinese to make it easier for Chinese developers to learn.
so I create a mirror site of your project here : https://missing-semester-cn.github.io/ as the Chinese version and if it looks good to you, please can you consider to link it from yours?

Though the site is not finished yet, I will translate one or two lecture notes per week, so I think it will be finished very soon.

BTW, you can check the source code here: https://github.com/missing-semester-cn/missing-semester-cn.github.io

The overview page uses which echo to show which program is executed when running echo $PATH. This is misleading. which only shows executables on the $PATH, but echo is built into most shells. For example, in Bash:

$ type -a echo
echo is a shell builtin
echo is /bin/echo

So when I run echo $PATH (or preferably echo "$PATH") it does not run /bin/echo, but rather the shell built-in. This is also mentioned in the GNU coreutils man echo:

NOTE: your shell may have its own version of echo, which usually supersedes the version described here. Please refer to your shell's documentation for details about the options it supports.