uTeach is a community oriented platform for sharing educational material and resources. uTeach is sort of a hybrid between reddit and piazza in functionality.

• Topics (equivalent to subreddits on reddit)
• Posts (equivalent to text post on reddit)
• Tags for posts (equivalent to tags on piazza posts)
• Pinned Posts
• Post voting
• Users & authentication (only Google accounts currently supported)
• Markdown support for post content
• Admin functionality (pin & unhide posts)
• Clean and intuitive Material Design user interface

• Golang 1.6+
• GCC (Sqlite3 dependency)
• Python 3.0+ (if using the database helper)

Notes:

• Ensure your GOPATH is correctly setup
• Setup config: see requirements in config/config.go. An example can be found in sample/
• Export $GOPATH/bin to your PATH for convenience
• Add .exe in front of executables if on Windows

go get github.com/BrianHarringtonUTSC/uTeach
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/BrianHarringtonUTSC

# Setup config...

# Run the app
$GOPATH/bin/uTeach --config=sample/config.json  # Or replace with your own config

# Make the required directories
mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/BrianHarringtonUTSC
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/BrianHarringtonUTSC

# Checkout repo from git
git init && git clone https://github.com/BrianHarringtonUTSC/uTeach
cd uTeach

# Get dependencies
go get .

# Install the app
go install

# Setup config...

# Run the app
$GOPATH/bin/uTeach --config=sample/config.json  # Or replace with your own config

uTeach is developed in the Go Programming Language.

This may seem like a peculiar choice at first. In fact you may have not even heard of Go before. Let's begin with understand the environment that uTeach is being developed in. uTeach will be developed by a few students students at a time working for a period of a few months. After this, a whole new group of students will take over the project and continue working on it. The choice of tools should be resilient to several developers of varied skills and experiences working on it for short period of times. Having a statically typed language greatly allevaites many of these problems. However, we don't want to add too much overhead to decrease developer productivity. In addition, the tools used cannot be complex, it should be easily picked up i.e. developers should become productive in working on the system in 1-2 weeks max. It should be familiar (not doing too many new things), cross platform and fast.

Go was a language designed at Google designed by pioneers of the field from the ground up to solve the problems that developers and projects are facing today which made it ideal for this project.

Below are a few links that highlight why Go is a good choice for this project:

• Used by many established companies to write high performant and stable production systems
• I keep seeing mature developers using languages like Go, Rust, Scala, and Erlang; how are those different from using the more common Node/JS, Ruby, PHP, and Python?
• How we built Uber Engineering's Highest Query Per Second Service Using Go
• Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering

This may end up being a mistake in the long run, who knows. Perhaps uTeach will be completely rewritten. My guess is that that large parts of uTeach will be rewritten to use a client side javascript library thus making the server a lean Go REST api.

At the time of writing this, the landscape of the web is rapidly changing. Backbone (taught in C09) is on a decline, Angular is being replaced by Angular 2 which is not backwards compatible. React is popular now, but might be overshadowed by other libraries once Web Components are standardized (Polymer, etc). Picking a library now might be outdated in a year. Thus, until the landscape has settled, it will be easier to develop the app as a pure server side, then convert it to a client side app down the line.

SQL is a proven and time tested technology. It also makes defining relationships between multiple tables clear and efficient which is beneficial for uTeach as it is a very clearly structured app. MongoDB is also an option, however its slow when depending on foreign keys and is more effective for simpler document models.

Sqlite made it easy to get going, thus I used it over others. It should be trivial to switch to another SQL db like postgres.

I won't go into a debate on whether or not to use an ORM, but I personally found an ORM for Go difficult to work with for uTeach as it required a lot inefficient restructuring. I am no database expert and there are some promising ORMs (go-pg - postgres specific, gorm) which could be good options for the future.

• Start by reading everything on this page. It has guides on how to setup and get running with Go.
• Make sure to do the "Tour of Go" to learn the language quickly (you do not need to do the concurrency sections for this web app).
• Familiarize yourself with Javascript and CSS.
• uTeach is roughly based on the Go Bootstrap Project. Some technologies are different, but most of it is the same. More importantly, the structure and layout of the app is closely matched. If you are confused on any part of the project, take a look and see how Go Bootstrap does it for better understanding. Go bootstrap does have some bad practises or inefficiencies which I have mostly fixed.
• Check out Go for Pythonistas for a guide on Go for Python programmers (if you have finished A08/A48).
• Spend some time setting up your environment. There is Go support in several IDEs. I use GoSublime with Sublime Text. The IntelliJ plugin also looks quite good.

• Make sure you run gofmt. Most IDEs/plugins will automatically run it for you as you code.
• Refresh Go Report Card. Try to keep it at 100%.