While this article has steps in the right direction, it's a lot of "use this thing". I operate a simple Flask/PostgreSQL webapp for CS Education through the luxury of my university. If/When I graduate from my program, what are the aspects I can do to minimize my costs for hosting the app? Of course I'll look for best approaches but why does that need to be forbidden knowledge known to a select few?
Its an aside, but the mentality of "let them figure it out" is a major issue in education. Foundational knowledge should be easy to acquire so I can worry about higher level thinking issues. Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle.
From the devops perspective, what about telling someone how to set up their own server to do/minimize X is so taxing?
- cloudflare free tier for caching, DNS, page rules, etc
- run everything on one VPS(digital ocean, linode, etc) pick cheapest that has specs you need
- any non-trivial storage (media, big files) move to Backblaze B2 it's cheap (you can use free tier cloudflare workers to redirect to B2 for free bandwidth due to Bandwitdth Alliance)
- free static page from Netifly (I can redirect to this with cloudflare in case my VPS falls over or something to provide info/links)
- If I want to look at logs or something I rsync it my local machine (if I cared I could set up a process to push logs/backup etc to private B2 bucket)
You may not need exact same setup, I am optimizing for caching and cheap storage because my site stores/serves lots of media files.
>Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle.
That's basically all of software development for your entire career. Never not had a day or a week not like that.
That is true and I recognize the purpose of being a proficient Googler; however my concerns stem out of the idea that learning many of those skills are not taught at all or expected to be learned in situ through programming assignments.
Here are examples of what I mean:
- An undergraduate Networking/Security course may not provide practice on appropriately salting passwords. It is merely discussed as part of some larger conceptual model. Students are browbeaten in earlier courses to not simply copy/paste code they find on the internet
- Debugging practice has to come from the student's own generated code, but if they made a mistake, they already are showing they do not fully grasp the material. There have been efforts to explicitly train debugging [1] but they are still in early stages of researching their benefits.
I don't think they need to be explicit courses, since that means making credits and charging students more. Rather, my research is about providing exercises specifically targeting those lower level skills. Since many of them are only a fraction of the "programming problem", they are do not require the expected hours and can be completed quickly. My hypothesis is that doing these types of problems will help reduce the time on task for coding.
Its an aside, but the mentality of "let them figure it out" is a major issue in education. Foundational knowledge should be easy to acquire so I can worry about higher level thinking issues. Literally spending hours trying to figure out how to set things up through hours of Googling doesn't really help that, nor does it promote the "figuring it out" people think it does - its just stumbling upon the right set of commands that let me move past this particular hurdle.
From the devops perspective, what about telling someone how to set up their own server to do/minimize X is so taxing?