Two days ago, a teacher's comment on a frustrating situation made me mad. Yesterday, I got to be part of something that made me very happy. Last night, Devorah and I ventured out to Coney Island to celebrate the twentieth wedding anniversary of two former students. It's such a joy and an honor to be included in these types of life events and even more so to count the couple and so many other former students and friends.

I was planning on writing up all the exciting CS Education work I got to be involved in these past two days but I saw a post on one of the CS discussion forums that got me riled. There's a teacher (name withheld to protect the innocent) who wants to create an advanced course for his students but his administration is requesting an outside measure of accountability. This sounds reasonable on the surface but I found it really insulting.

I'm enjoying reading about Ria Galanos' new chapter on her blog. In her most recent post Ria briefly talks about the fact that very few professional developers start from scratch and most work in existing large code bases. She wonders why the College Board got rid of the APCS-A case study and talked about how it gave students an opportunity to work on a multi-file complex system. Over the past few years others have wondered if the College Board should bring it back.

I spent today at Codeland, a one day conference in NYC designed for developers in the early stages of their careers. Just as at CSTA, I was there with the GitHub contingent. Codeland had talks and a keynote in a common auditorium, smaller breakout workshops and a couple of small vendor areas. I spent most of the morning upstairs in the GitHub lounge so I onl caught part of one morning talk.

Every year for the past sixteen we venture down to Lancaster Pa. for a weekend of car camping. Actually, there's not much camping anymore. I used to be a bit more hardcore having done a few sections of the Appalachian Trail in my youth. Now, as I've gotten older I've come to appreciate little things like air conditioning, showers, beds, and toilets. So, nowadays we usually try to get a cabin at a camp site.

There were a bunch of threads on the 10X Developer recently. You know - that mythical beast that's 10 times more productive than the regular software engineer. I didn't see any of the original threads but I'm guessing they started with "your startup needs them" and then moved to the "they can't work with anyone" along with tons of fun tongue and cheek 1X engineer tweets. It got me thinking about 10X students.

So, I got back from CSTA2019 and promptly got a summer cold which laid me up for the past couple of days. Phoenix was beautiful even with it being unbearably hot at times and it's a place I think I'd like to visit again when it's a bit cooler. I said in an earlier post that for me, CSTA is typically more of a person conference and less of a session conference and that held true again.

Many of us know Ria Galanos. Ria - a longtime friend and longtime CS teacher who has been very active in the APCS community has started a new chapter as a software engineer at Yext. Ria's also started blogging about it. I don't know the direction the blog will take but I'm sure it will be influenced by Ria's years as an educator. I'm also sure it will be worth reading.

It's Monday morning, 7:45AM local time. Being on East Coast time, Devorah and I have already been up for about 3 hours, hit the gym and our first cups of our chosen caffeinated beverages. Since it's not unbearably hot outside - a cool and dry 80 in the shade - we're sitting outside. Devorah's knitting another square for Blanket Statement so I figured I'd write a few words about what we've been doing here in Phoenix leading up to our starting with our conference later today.

Looking forward to flying out to Phoenix for CSTA-2019 Saturday morning. The conference doesn't officially start until Sunday, Monday for me since I'm not doing any of the pre-conference workshops. We'll have most of Saturday as long as we're up to it, Sunday, and Monday morning. Actually, there is the GitHub reception on Sunday evening so that's kind of official conference stuff. As to the conference, I'm super looking forward to it.