2017-08-14: Introducing Web Archiving and Docker to Summer Workshop Interns

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Last Wednesday, August 9, 2017, I was invited to give a talk to some summer interns of the Computer Science Department at Old Dominion University. Every summer our department invites some undergrad students from India and hosts them for about a month to work on some projects under a research lab here as summer interns. During this period, various research groups introduce their work to those interns to encourage them to become potential graduate applicants. Those interns also act as academic ambassadors who motivate their colleagues back in India for higher studies.

This year, Mr. Ajay Gupta invited a group of 20 students from Acharya Institute of Technology and B.N.M. Institute of Technology and supervised them during their stay at Old Dominion University. Like the last year, I was selected from the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group again to introduce them with the concept of web archiving and various researches of our lab. An overview of the talk can be found in my last year's post.



Recently, I have been selected as the Docker Campus Ambassador for ODU. I thought it would be a great opportunity to introduce those interns with the concept of software containerization. Among numerous other benefits, it would help them deal with the "works on my machine" problem (also known as "magic laptop" problem), common in students' life.


After finishing the web archiving talk, I briefly introduced them with the basic concepts and building blocks of Docker. Then I illustrated the process of containerization with the help of a very simple example.



I encouraged them to interrupt me during the talk to ask any relevant questions as both the topics were fairly new for them. Additionally, I tried to bring in references from Indian culture, politics, and cinema to make it more engaging for them. Overall, I was very happy with the kind of questions they were asking, which gave me the confidence that they were actually absorbing these new concepts and not asking questions just for the sake of grabbing some swags that included T-shirts and stickers from Docker and Memento.


--
Sawood Alam

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