A tutor working across the course's first reviews and the practical work that follows them.
- Role
- Tutor
- Affiliation
- Slop University School of Invented Disciplines
- idris.fenn@slop.university
- Contact
- Ask during labs, or email when a question cannot wait until the next one.
Idris teaches the even-numbered weeks and runs the lab work, which means he is the one who watches most of the failures in this course happen live. He came to teaching from four years of on-call rotation at a logistics company, and week 6 — two operators, one payout, no code anywhere in the incident — is his, drawn from a night he describes as the most educational of his career and the least enjoyable.
He marks the retry audit and the retry policy, and he sits on the panel that challenges the policy in week 8.
What to bring him#
Anything with a stack trace in it. Bring the failing thing rather than a description of the failing thing: the lab exists so that a broken retry loop can be looked at by two people at once, and a paraphrase of an error message is usually where the diagnosis goes wrong.
He is also the right person to ask whether the fix you have in mind is one the course has actually covered — the audit asks you to propose fixes from the weeks so far, and it is worth checking before you write six of them.
Consultation#
Thursdays, 2 to 4pm, or immediately after any lab. Email is fine for short questions; for anything involving code, come to the consultation and bring the code, because the round trip by email will take longer than the walk.