Here's the first video in my learning elisp series. Elisp is a lisp variant embedded within the Emacs editor. You could actually describe Emacs as an "elisp machine" in the same sense of the old lisp machines. It's not quite the same as the way most other editors have extension or plugin languages. Other than the core of Emacs, which is written in C, everything is elisp. Even when you type in a key.

There was some discussion the other day resulting from some info released by the College Board on this past years APCS-A exam.The "hardest" question was the 2D Array free response. As it happened, 34% of test takers earned 0 out of 9 points on the question. What's interesting is that the College Board noted that at the same time, students did very well on the multiple choice 2D array questions.

Today our Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to eliminate racial considerations in admissions decisions or affirmative action. This will be celebrated by some and reviled by others even though it probably won't make a huge difference in terms of class makeup at most "elite" institutions. Given my leanings and who I follow, you can probably guess which views I'm seeing more of. The cases that have generally been brought against institutions implementing affirmative action usually amount to "I was more qualified than the affirmative action candidate you took" with public cries of "you're lowering standards.

With all the AI hubbub there's been a lot of talk about AI and teaching. Will it enhance teaching? Replace teachers? Others? In this vein, I saw this tweet by Pat Yongpradit of code.org yesterday evening: I would share the nuance that teachers who don't use AI might be replaced by teachers who use AI, but honestly we need as many of you as possible. Our students need teachers to expand their effectiveness with AI, even if it just opens up more time for developing student… https://t.

Yesterday, I noticed a LinkedIn post by my friend Jonathan Gottfried of Major League Hacking about an MLH podcast, The State of Developer Education. The episode he shared caught my eye. It was titled "Do you Really Need a Degree for Tech?" Here's the YouTube link. It featured Lauren Schaeffer, Developer Advocate for Grammarly. I enjoyed listening to Jon and Lauren's conversation and recommend that you too take a listen, Lauren talked a bit about her journey and highlighted some happenings and practices along the way in school, IBM, MongoDB, and finally Grammarly.

Before I get to my elisp series, I thought I'd do a short video on elfeed-webkit. This was suggested to me by jcs. Even though I think elfed-webkit is great - a mini-gamechanger for me, I thought that there wasn't enough for a video. Then I realized that in order to run elfeed-webkit you need to have xwidgets enabled in your Emacs build. I thought I'd make a video on how I build Emacs and enable features like xwidgets and then I quickly set up elfeed-webkit.

It's been quite some time since my last Emacs video. The lack of content has been for two reasons. One was my overall feeling of burnout and the other was that most of my videos involved looking at new packages and I really wasn't playing with anything new. Now that I've started my retirement the burnout is gone and I'm starting to think about what my next adventures will be.

Yesterday, someone posted this link to the various CS teacher groups on Facebook. A Masters program in teaching CS. As I usually do, I took a look. I've spoken before about the variation of quality in teacher certification programs across all subjects. Some are great but many (many) are bad. I blame this largely on NCLB but that's for another day. For CS I've lamented that while I'd like to think that my program is strong and I know there are programs like Siena's that are great but there are others both in NY State and out that are quite frankly, certificate mills.

Last night, I gave a talk to this years HackNY fellows. It was a lot of fun. I was originally going to speak about liberal arts and tech education but I was asked to do something more on my professional journey as a teacher so I did that. Had a great time but figured I'd write about the liberal art stuff here anyway. Over the last few months, I've noticed a surge in social media pushing the humanities in CS education.

So, I went for my walk yesterday and indeed was able to settle on a topic for my HackNY talk next week. HackNY is, for lack of a better description, a support system for tech interns in NYC. It started 12 years ago. Back then, a college student would apply to HackNY. If accepted, they would be matched with a NY based tech startup and they'd be housed, I believe in the NYU dorms.