New Tech Staff
Welcome To the Geek Section Newbie! This page is your new best friend!
Disclaimer: This page is NOT helpful at all if you are still wondering why you joined McNair Center, or questioning your life choices in general. Please schedule a therapeutic session with Ed or Anne.
Contents
Setup
Make sure you have access to each of the following:
User Page
Every McNair staff maintains his own personal wikipage, detailing administrative information and professional/academic background, alongside a short autobiography.
Refer to Dylan's Wikipage for inspiration. Or refer to the comprehensive staff list.
Create your own Wikipage by going to Form:McNair_Staff and filing out the form. On the first page of the form use your Full Name with spaces (like Ed Egan), not your username. Fill out the fields. For the image, upload one (see "Upload file" in the left Wiki sidebar) and just put the name of the file in the box (e.g. YourPic.jpg). Finally go to your user page (click your username at the top of the page), edit that page and include the following line:
#REDIRECT [[Full Name]]
Faculty Members to the McNair Center should also fill out a page. Please use this form Form:McNair_Faculty.
Working with the Wiki
At McNair, the Wiki is both home to developed content in the form of an independent public Wikipage, and developing content that will serve a academic paper, issue brief or blog post in the future. It is the research team's main tool for knwoledge sharing, pooling resources, writing and peer-editing.
To get started,
- Basic Wiki Markup Guide
- Forms and Templates - Working with pre-existing ones and making new ones
- When in doubt, contact Ed or ask a friend!
Useful resources from wikipedia:
You should also be creating pages for identified topic areas and to keep track of your projects. You must secure your pages by adding them to Category:Internal or some other appropriate category, so that they are available only to McNair staff and faculty. If you try to create a page that already exists the form will redirect you to edit that page.
Expectations
- You are the computer 'expert'. This means that you are not just a programmer/computer scientist but also a geek squad guy!
- This means you write scripts, web crawlers, maintain hardware, help others with computer science stuff and fix production issues with website
- When you come into the office, log into the RDP for work - this is how we track your attendance
- Avoid using your personal laptop for work unless your project demands that you use your own machine
- You should also maintain a work log. Add entries everytime you come in. Put in your intended target for that day and make sure you record even mundane events that take up your project time such as ad-hoc requests for help, random technical issues that need immediate attention etc.
Whats with this Work log??
Many people are uncomfortable when told to write down what they have done that day. Worry not, we trust you to be sincere with your work. The real purpose of the work log is to serve as a data point so that we can plan our projects better and see whats holding us back. This data is always critical for an organization's success.
"Everything that you see and hear and live is made by other people; feel free to change it." - Steve Jobs
