Theory of Distributed Systems

This course is run as a flipped class room. There is not going to be a lecture. Instead, every week there are going to be a Q&A session and an exercise session.
Your task is to prepare each of these sessions. For the Q&A session, this means that you bring your questions, ideas, and requests about discussing parts of the material interactively. For the exercise session, this means that you have composed some preliminary thoughts and ideas on how to tackle the exercises, which then are discussed and executed in the exercise session.

A typical week looks as follows:

1. Q&A session preparation (expected 3-5 hours of work):
   • read the script (and optionally view last year's video) for the upcoming lecture
   • hand in a one-page summary of the content of the upcoming lecture, abstracting the main ideas in your own words, until the night before the lecture 
   • write down (at least) three of the most important obstacles to understanding you face(d); try to clearly identify where the difficulty lies (e.g., "the proof of theorem X, specifically step Y")
   • optional, but highly encouraged: discuss the issues you and others identified (in [virtual] person or via the mailing list, where we can chime in)
2. Q&A session: ask your questions and actively participate in the discussions
3. exercise session preparation (expected 1 hour of work):
   • read the exercise sheet
   • hand in a write-up of your own ideas on the exercises (no full solutions expected, no more than one page per single exercise) until the night before the tutorial 
   • optional, but highly encouraged: exchange your ideas with others (it is okay if this affects your hand-in; simply state where the ideas are from)
4. exercise session: actively contribute to the discussion developing the solutions to the exercises

As you can see, there is a much higher emphasis on the preparation of the lecture than in a standard course.
This is essential, as the Q&A session serves to complete your understanding of the lecture material.
In order for the Q&A sessions to be successful, it is imperative that you identify the issues they should focus on.

How to hand in your submissions

Please submit your summaries and exercise ideas via email to the TA (<lastname>@mpi-inf.mpg.de), adhering to the following rules:

• Heading: "[ToDS] <{Lecture, Exercise}> <Number> Submission <Your Student ID>"; example: "[ToDS] Lecture 1 Submission 0123456"
• Body: None that goes beyond variants of "please find attached", especially no general comments, requests, concerns etc. (use a separate email for those)
• Attachment: one(!) PDF of reasonable size (<<10 MB) containing your submission as well as your name and your student ID(!); if you scan hand-written solutions, make sure that a reasonable person that is not you can read them
• Attachment File Name: "ToDS_<{Lecture,Exercise}>_<Number>_Submission_<Your Student ID>.pdf"; example: "ToDS_Lecture_1_Submission_0123456.pdf"

If you do not have a Student ID (yet), use your name wherever the Student ID is required in the above.

Your submissions must arrive until midnight on the day before the session for which they are due (what matters is the timestamp of your email in the TA's inbox).