ECE 150 Fundamentals of Programming

                   

A lot of students would like to include examples of their code on their resumes. This is especially true if this is your first course in programming.

There are issues with posting your code publicly, as you are still responsible for keeping your code from other students who may be seeking to plagiarize your solution. Thus, here are some steps you can take:

• Purchase a private account with either github or repl.it, and then include a link to your code with your resume.
• Remove any reference to the University of Waterloo or any course-related comments; this includes any references to ECE 150 and any testing tools we use in the course.
• Do not include your uWaterloo User ID or e-mail address in your code: the viewer should already have that information.
• Change the names of functions and classes so that they are still descriptive of what operations or information those functions perform or classes represent, respectively, but by changing the names, a naive first-year student who is explicitly attempting to plagiarize will not easily find your source code on the web.
• Perhaps use an account ID other than your uWaterloo User ID. If your uWaterloo User ID is j1234smi, you could pick something like j300smith if you like the movie 300. If your uWaterloo User ID is j7890zha, you could pick something like j42zhang if you like the book "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

While private accounts are preferable, we understand that some of you simply cannot afford a private account; however, if you take appropriate steps to disassociate your account and your source code from this institution and this course, you should be okay. We, however, will not say what is sufficient disassociation; that is up to you to determine what is appropriate.

Please note, projects in courses are useful, but interviewers will be more interested in projects you have crafted yourself. Right now, if you are currently in ECE 150, this is really not an option; however, please consider taking some time in your first co-op term to find problems you are interested in and attempt to solve those problems through implementations in C++ or your language of choice.

Important: Any source code you write is your intellectual property, so you can never be found guilty of distributing intellectual property that is not your own. Most universities have policies whereby anything submitted for grading nominally becomes property of the university. Consequently, if you were to expand a project that you submitted for a course project, if you were to profit from that expanded project, the university may have intellectual property claims against you. This is not true at Waterloo: the products of your work here at Waterloo are yours, and the only claim that the university makes is that the university reserves the right to use your submissions for academic purposes.