REPL is a shared notebook for one computer science degree, built on a pun

What REPL is, and why it is called that

REPL is a repository that aims to become a central place to share resources that other learners have found useful, with the emphasis on the context of studying a BSc Computer Science offered by Goldsmiths, University of London. It is the learning hub for that degree, and its audience is students and prospective students rather than the wider developer community.

The name is a pun. REPL stands for read-eval-print loop in programming, and the project describes itself as a twist on that use of the term. The joke also describes the shape of the thing: a read, evaluate, print loop for your own education, run on a repository that anyone in the cohort can push to.

The project is friendly to newcomers by design. The readme carries a first-timers-only-friendly badge, a badge inviting pull requests, and an MIT licence badge, and the contributing philosophy is stated plainly elsewhere in the documentation: no contribution is too small, and beginners are pointed at a Discord server and to the maintainers' email if they do not know where to start.

What you get is a curated, maintained index. That is a smaller thing than a learning platform, and it is worth being clear about that before reading further.

A Jekyll site that is really a directory of directories

The repository layout is the architecture. The top level holds a _config.yml, a _sass directory, an assets directory and index.html, which is the shape of a Jekyll site, and the published result lives at world-class.github.io/REPL.

Everything else at the top level is a section of the hub, and each is its own directory: modules, books, software, job-opportunities, kinks, online-courses with separate free and paid areas, slack, subreddit, podcasts, after-uol, applying-to-uol, faq, websites, youtube, and assets for images.

The naming tells you what each section is for. modules maps the structure of the degree. kinks collects the traps in individual modules, the things a first year student only discovers by failing them. online-courses splits free from paid, which is a useful distinction in a degree delivered fully remotely. after-uol points to what comes next, including masters, PhD study and certificates. applying-to-uol covers the admissions process. job-opportunities points at roles, and another section collects applications students built.

The FAQ is a separate document rather than a page, and the readme links to it as the first numbered entry, which signals that answering questions is treated as a first-class activity of the project rather than an afterthought.

Semester-shaped releases and a week counter in the readme

The readme leads with a current week indicator, currently week 27, and then invites readers to file an issue if the start date of the next semester is missing or wrong. That single line tells you how this repository is maintained.

The releases confirm it. Each tag is named for a semester rather than a feature: v2.3.0 is titled for getting ready for the next semester on 10 October 2022, v2.2.0 for the semester of 4 April 2022, and v2.1.0 for the semester of 11 October 2021. The cadence is twice a year, aligned to the academic calendar, not to code changes.

Meanwhile the last push to the repository was on 2026-10-19, years after the most recent tagged release. So the repository is edited constantly and released rarely. That is a sensible split for this kind of content, since most edits are a new link, a corrected URL or an updated note rather than a milestone, but it has one consequence for anyone pinning versions: the tagged releases do not describe the current state of the content.

The practical reading is that you should treat master as the live version and ignore the tags unless you are studying a specific past cohort.

Where the actual content lives: notes, assets and community channels

Some of the most-used resources are not in this repository at all, and the readme is upfront about that. Notes from students, professors and others live in the separate world-class/notes repository and open directly on GitHub. University of London documents and webpages of interest live in a binary-assets repository, and the readme notes that those are available only from the University of London.

The community channels are a mixed bag of open and closed. The Discord servers are described as a community of students, great for prospective students, and a community of graduates to stay in touch after the degree, and both invite links are public. The Slack workspace is different: the UoL Slack workspace is marked as students only, so a new arrival needs an enrolled account before the workspace will be useful. The subreddit r/UniversityOfLondonCS is public, and the subreddit section additionally hosts a series of in-depth articles written by one contributor.

Modules themselves are studied on Coursera. The help section explains that module-specific issues go to the discussion forums on the Coursera module page, that general non-academic questions such as university policy go in a specific Reach out forum on the orientation course, and that personal matters including enrolment, financing, recognition of prior learning and mitigating circumstances go directly to the university through its Enquiry Hub.

That division of labour between the repository and the university systems is the shape of the whole project: the repository curates and explains, the university administers.

The project teaches you how to research and debug, not just where to click

One of the more distinctive parts of the documentation is the guidance on how to ask for help and how to find answers, which is written as if it were a first-year tutorial rather than a support page.

The stated premise is that succeeding in this degree has a lot to do with how resourceful you are, that the page is meant to be helpful guidance, and that developing key skills on your own becomes an increasing necessity. Three skills are named: researching online, debugging code effectively, and knowing how to ask questions.

For each there is a reading list. Research points to the university's own information skills pages on effective searching of databases. Asking points to Stack Overflow's guidance on how to ask questions and how to create a minimal reproducible example, plus a lecture from the Introduction to Programming I module that requires enrolment to view. Debugging points to a beginner debugging article and to Microsoft's guide to debugging for absolute beginners in VS Code. Finding answers includes a list of search engines and search technique advice.

This is a deliberate choice. A degree delivered entirely remotely has no campus, so the informal knowledge that students would otherwise pick up in corridors has to be written down somewhere, and REPL is where it is written down.

A link directory with a thin toolchain and an MIT licence

The engineering content of the repository is minimal by design, and the package manifest shows it. The only dependency is a development dependency on the all-contributors-cli, which is the tool that generates the contributors list.

{
  "devDependencies": {
    "all-contributors-cli": "^6.20.0"
  }
}

There is no application code here, no build pipeline of any consequence, and no test suite. The site is generated by Jekyll from the _config.yml, the _sass styles and the content directories, and it is served from GitHub Pages. Two lockfiles are present, package-lock.json and yarn.lock, which is a small sign of a project maintained by several contributors with different habits rather than a deliberate policy.

The licence is MIT, which is the right choice for a collection of links and notes: anyone can fork it, mirror it, or lift a section into their own notes without the copyleft obligations of the more common licences for documentation work. The topics listed for the repository, from books and modules to slack and podcasts, match the directory names exactly.

One caveat about content that is genuinely hard to avoid: a substantial part of this repository is other people's work. The books, the courses and the YouTube videos are pointers to third-party resources, and the documents section is explicitly limited to documents from the University of London. A link directory that keeps going needs those links checked, and the readme shows that happening through bug reports about specific broken or missing things rather than through a systematic link checker.

Editorial conclusion

REPL suits a student entering or continuing the University of London computer science degree, and suits a prospective student trying to understand what the course actually involves before enrolling. It does not suit a developer looking for a library or a tool, and the help and community sections are largely useless to anyone outside the cohort. Before relying on it, open the modules directory and the FAQ, check that the semester and week shown in the readme match the term you are studying in, and confirm that the linked resources such as the Slack workspace still admit new members, since those links depend on external services this repository does not control.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. world-class/REPL on GitHub