One of my pet annoyances is how code ecosystems have gotten more and more complex. Sometimes I think tool designers put together build systems to show how clever they are rather than to solve dependency problems as cleanly and simply as possible. Over the break I wrote GitHub Org Explorer - a tool to help deal with GitHub classroom repositories. It worked but was using "basic" authentication where it sent a username and password with every request.

I thought it was time to give eshell in Emacs another try. It has some pretty cool features but for whatever reason, I've never really been able to adopt Emacs as my go to shell. Eshell out of the box is pretty cool but could use some enhancements. When launching at login it doesn't know about the path you set in your .bashrc or .zshrc in my case files. It just seemed to have problems with paths in general but that was fixed with the exce-path-from-shell package.

I saw a couple of posts the other day about the CS Ed Podcast. Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke interviewed (or will interview) six CS educators on a variety of topics. There are four posted so far: David Malan Dan Garcia Amy Ko Mark Guzdial Before I started I thought I'd listen to a few and then share some thoughts but I found so much to unpack in the second episode where Dan talks about testing that I decided to share my thoughts on the first episode, then Dan's and then see if find anything to comment on in episodes three and beyond.

The other day I stumbled upon Emacs's Live Coding plugin. It takes interactive coding up to the next level. Normally, when you code Python, if you're working in a REPL, every time you hit <Enter> the line you just typed is evaluated. When you're working ina source file, you're just editing until you send the file into a Python interpreter. With this module, your file is continually evaluated as you type and it shows you the results in a side window.

Two of the challenges faced by young computer science students are finding the time to build independent projects for their portfolios and getting feedback from and networking with tech professionals. Enter Hunter Codefest 2020 <style> .flip { -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); -moz-transform: rotate(180deg); -o-transform: rotate(180deg); -ms-transform: rotate(180deg); transform: rotate(180deg); } </style> <br clear="all"> Hunter, like most colleges has a Fall semester that runs from late August through the end of Decemeber and a Spring semester that starts at the end of January and runs through late may.

Yesterday we had another Professional Development Workshop for High School CS Teachers and as usual, I wnat to express my thanks to Digital Ocean for continuing to provide space, food, and great overall support. This time though, instead of JonAlf and I having to run the show we had a guest speaker. We were joined by Sarah Judd of AI4ALL. Sarah gave an overview of what AI4ALL was up to and why but the core of her presentation was taking us through some of the exercises they have been developing at AI4All.

Natan commenting on work the other day: "You have two lists. One is sorted, the other is not. Every item in one list corresponds to an item in the other. Is it faster to sort the unsorted list and then merge them, or simply go through the unsorted list in order and pair each item with the item you can find in the presorted list?" is a question I asked today in the dressing room of an off-Broadway theater.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who had just started doing grad work in school leadership. It got me thinking about my original career plans and how you never know where you're going to end up. Well, not my original original career plans. When I started on Wall Street I had no idea what the future would bring. For all I knew, I could have been a career professional programmer or even gone over to the business side.

Continuing from yesterday, what about the article and report on pay and free teacher resources. The report looked at three sources - one pay and two free. They came up with a number of results but I think they largely missed the point. Their bottom line conclusion was that 'Overall, reviewers rate most of the materials as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using”.' They also didn't seem to find that neither the for profit or free sources were universally better.

There was a bit of buzz a couple of months ago when Amazon announced an online marketplace for educational resources. It wasn't a new concept - on the pay side, Teachers Pay Teachers has been around for a while and in terms of free, there are many online resources but they're not necessarily well organized or curated. What was the buzz? Should teachers be charging their peers for class materials or should they be providing them for free.