Connecting to NVCC Zulip

by Jeff Elkner

Zulip is a chat and collaboration software application similar to, but much better than related tools such as Slack and Discord.

I make this claim for four reasons:

Zulip is free software while the other two are evil propriatary sofware.
Not only is Zulip free software but it is a wonderful example of a web application written in mostly in Python, a programming language of which many of us are very fond here at ACC. In fact, it makes use of the Python web framework, Django, which we also like a lot.
Zulip has a communication model, built around streams and topics, which makes it much easier to get real work done using it. We will see this in practice, since each of our classes will have it's own stream, and within that stream we can organize as many topics as we like.
Finally, one of the four orginial creators of Zulip, Waseem Daher, is a graduate of Yorktown High School, so you'll be using software written by a former APS student. Waseem was also a former student of mine (see The Guido van Robot Programming Language: Developers), so I can tell you stories of some of Waseem's amazing exploits from back in his high school days.

The process you will use to connect to our Zulip chat is as follows:

You will receive an invitation through your NVCC email address.
You will install the Zulip for macOS application on your school macbook.
You will accept the invitation, create and account and sign-in to our nvcc.zulipchat.com organization.