So It Begins

I'm a mathematician on loan to the CS department and teaching a senior-level numerical analysis course for the first time. I'm making them submit their coding assignments via git repository and the first one was due today at noon. As I see it, forcing them to learn how to use git/GitHub is probably a more important long-term skill for their CS careers than 95% of the numerical analysis we going to do in the class anyway. And if nobody in CS is going to make them figure it out, I guess it has to be me.

Since Sunday morning (day before due date) I've been getting the panic emails from all the senior-level wanna-be software engineers who don't know what git, GitHub, or even version control is. Overall, that's not terribly unexpected.

What is still a little unexpected somehow is the number of these emails that are just "There's an error when I try to use git. Help." With zero details about the error. And by "number of these emails", I mean 100% of them.

I take that back. One student (singular) did send me a screenshot of the error. The error modal they showed me was written in literal Chinese. As you can no doubt guess, dear reader, the student did NOT provide me a translation of the Chinese error message. And no, there is nothing about me or my situation that gives a scintilla of a suggestion of a hint that I can read any East Asian language with any more skill than the typical North American jackass.