I've been spending a lot of time at area high schools this fall. Today I was at FDR High School in Broooklyn. <figure><img src="" width="500px"/> </figure> I only learned about FDR HS a little over a year ago when I met their CS teacher Josh Hans at a NYC PD event. I visit last fall and then again today. Whenever I visit a school it's a different experience. Sometimes I speak to the CS classes, sometimes at an event like a CS Week hackathon, once I even got to address an entire senior class in an auditorium.

I started to work on a web application the other day. It's nothing special but if I ever finish it, it will be a pretty complete project. The backend will be a REST API and I'm planning on writing the frontend in Clojurescript. The problem with developing a web application like this is that you can't really write the front end until you have enough of the backend to provide data.

My friend Ria tweeted this earlier today: If you are a software developer/engineer, please reply with a trait (or traits) that you look for in hiring new engineers (new grads). This can be something you glean from a resume, technical interview, behavorial interview, or all of the above. — Ria Galanos (@cscheerleader) October 20, 2019 I'm not hiring for a tech company but I thought I'd share some thoughts anyway.

Org-mode is my markup of choice. I spend the vast majority of my time working on text files working in org-mode. Since GitHUb started rendering org-mode files in their site I've also used org-mode for things like Readme files in my projects. I even force it on my students at times. When I make an assignment, I seed it with an org-mode file that they have to modify - that is - fill in things like their names, group members etc.

I spent the last few days in Milwuakee at High Ed web 2019, a conference for higher education web professionals. Most attendees were college web developers or designers along people who run web operations at colleges and universities and related vendors. Being a CS teacher, I was a bit of an outsider but still got a lot out of the conference. It was our first time in Milwuakee so we had to see some sights.

This morning Mark Guzdial tweeted on his latest post: Results from Longitudinal Study of Female Persistence in CS: AP CS matters, After-school programs and Internships do not https://t.co/GOzp3045Hp — Mark Guzdial (@guzdial) October 14, 2019 I'm glad Mark wrote about this as it's something that's important to both research and publicize but it's really not a surprise. I'm going to start by dismissing the statement that "… participation in the Aspirations awards program were teh best predictors of persistence three years after the high school survey in both CS and other technology-related majors.

I was working on writing a midterm the other day so figured I'd talk a bit about my test grading policy. Before getting to the specifics, let me set the stage. I spent most of my career at Stuyvesant - a public magnet school in NYC. There are many great students who are interested in learning but there's also a focus on grades. and this leads to a non-insignificant portion of the student body that is grade obsessed and will do everything and anything for every point possible.

Or, as Wayne Gretzky said "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Why do I mention this? Because I've been hearing way too often from young people who are too quick to deny themselves opportunities and too often these are from students who have come from less advantaged backgrounds. It's Fall and I've been making my rounds visiting local schools to talk to seniors about colleges in general and Hunter CS in particular.

I've been wanting to check out lsp-mode under Emacs for a while now. LSP stands for Language Protocol Service. The idea is that you have a standard interface between your editor and some language server. If you program in multiple languages and each has an LSP server you end up, in theory, with a simpler configuration and a consistent interface. This certainly sounds more appealing than how we did it in the old days where you have some ad hoc configuraiton for each language you work in.

I'm guessing that pretty much everyone who stops by this blog knows about the CSTA (Computer Science Teacher's Association) and most of you probably know about some awards they, well, award. Just in case, I thought I'd share. Here are three awards, two of which are open for nominations / applications now. If you know someone deserving, nominate them. I'm guessing students don't really know about the Cutler-Bell award so if you have any deserving students, please share the info with them.