So, one of the things I've been doing since retirement is working for and with my alumni community. We've held focussed events like an AI panel and a blockchain talk and have had meetups in New York and beyond - specifically Boston and San Francisco. Last Thursday we focussed on entrepreneurship. The idea wasn't mine. Stuy grad, Jae Zhou, a lawyer at Morrison Forester (MOFO) approached me with the idea about a year ago.

I wanted to follow up on my earlier post on why teaching CS still matters. In that post, I cited a couple of former students. Not only former students but particularly high achieving ones. One friend commented on that - the idea that my thesis may makes sense for those high achievers but not everyone. I maintain that CS, if taught right is still important for all students. It's about thinking and problem solving and that exploring programming can help build those thinking and problem solving skills.

Still in St. Louis but we're now up to sessions and BOFs. On Thursday, I attended two sponsor sessions on AI. One by GitHub and the other Google. In retrospect, they were both really the same session - on how their developers and other professionals are using AI. The big difference? Do you want your AI co-pilot flavored or Gemini/Antigravity? The key points from the GitHub session was that when using AI, context is everything - it's easy to say "build me a minecraft code" because the term "minecraft code" brings all the context.