I've been using the gmail web interface for a long time. My first email or at least the oldest one still in the system dates back to Oct 18, 2004 7:29am. It was a letter to a buddy about an indoor turkey fryer and if he needed a lift to Fairway the following morning to shop. Before that, I used my Panix shell account - probably with PINE. Work email was using my own servers at Stuy along with either PINE or Emacs using VM mode which has long been deprecated.

As many of you know, the CS Education programs I designed here at Hunter were finally approved by NY State late last year. We're planning to get started this summer. I've received many questions about the program and will write up the details here sooner or later but one question I frequently get is "will it be offered online?" This is also something I've been asked more than once internal to Hunter.

In this video we'll look at creating a small router. I originally looked at using one of the available libraries to set up routing. I considered reitit and bidi but in the end decided to figure out how to do it myself. It turns out that whenever you change the hash part of a url - everything following a # at the end of a url you get a hashchange event.

Every few years the experts give us some new magic bullet, some new teaching fad research based pedagogical technique. Teachers are trained in it, forced to use it - frequently as a one size fits all. If we do, we're good teachers, if we don't we get the dreaded ineffective on our annual ratings. I was reminded of this when reading Mark Guzdial's recent blog post on things he got wrong in Computing Education.

I got some positive feedback from my first Clojurescript post and video so I thought I'd continue with the series. Here we'll continue to build a simple Clojurescript/Shadow-cljs/Reagent/Tailwindcss application by creating some reusable components. It's one of the things that make Clojurescript so nice for web development. Here's a link to the GitHub repo with the code: https://github.com/zamansky/shadow-cljs-demo <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_CTTbC6owS0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Yesterday was, I think the fourth, To Code and Beyond conference hosted by Diane Levitt at Cornell Technion. I might blog about a few of the talks but for today let's start with one. In spite of my anti College Board bias, I really enjoyed Barbara Ericson's talk on APCS statistics. Barbara's been breaking down the APCS numbers for years - how many took the exam(s), how many passed them.

I've been playing with ClojureScipt for my web projects recently and really like it. Much more fun than any of the JavaScript frameworks I've used. Still, getting started was somewhat difficult due to the number of options in tooling and uneven documentation and learning resources. Here's a video that shows how I use Emacs for ClojureScript development but the focus of the video is on how to get started with ClojureScript and Emacs takes a back seat other than an example of my workflow.

I'm a big fan of GitHub Classroom and use it for all of my class assignments. It's great for organizing, distributing, and collecting assignments and gets the kids used to using real world tools at the same time. I've written a bunch of posts on how I use it: How I use GitHub Classroom Communicating with Students - meybe GitHub to the rescue GitHub as a tool for education (part of a 4 part series) As well as a couple of others.

On the last day of 2019, Audrey Waters wrote a great piece on The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade. I agree with most of them but felt it was worth looking at a one in particular. Specifically number 6 - "Everyone Should earn to Code." I might dive in to some others later but we'll stick with number 6 for today. I read over these right after reading two recent posts by Alina Adam's son Gregory - a sophomore at Stuyvesant High School over on Alina's blog questioning NYC's CS For All initiative.

Happy new year to everyone. I've been reading some prediction posts this morning on blogs and social media. Big national and world level stuff. I've never been much for predictions so I thought I'd share some more local and personal things I'm looking forward to in the coming year. First a couple of big ones. I'm just about to complete my fourth year at Hunter. Time really does fly. It's been a long road but late in 2019 NY State finally approved our CS Teacher Certification programs!