It was Jon and Amy's wedding. Jon was my student back in the day so there were a handful of Stuy alums there to celebrate the occasion. Some, like Jon, I had stayed in touch with and now count as friends. Others, I knew but hadn't kept up with. I was with a cluster of guests and for some reason the conversation turned to chess computers. I started telling a story about the my former teacher Herb Greenhut's Talking Chess Challenger computer.

Do we really need CS focused high schools? That's the question Alfred Thompson asked partly in reaction to my post talking about Bill Gates' visit to AFSE, a NYC public school with a CS focus. On both posts, Michael Preston shared some important and good points about AFSE as a starting point and gateway that helped lead to CS4All in NYC and also specifically about AFSE. In response to Alfred's question I thought it was time I shared a bit about what I was pushing for AFSE back when I was involved.

AFSE stands for the Academy for Software Engineering. It's a public school in New York City with a stated focus on, well, software engineering. I have some history with the school and its creation but that's not what this post is about. In fact, this post isn't really about AFSE at all. I plan to neither praise or critique the school. This is about what Bill Gates wrote about his recent visit.

Yesterday, Alfred Thompson asked "Why is it important for CS students to understand binary?" on Twitter which led to a number of interesting responses. Alfred summarized and wrote his own thoughts on his blog. I wanted to add a comment but I already wrote a post for yesterday so put it off until today. First let me say that you can have a very successful career in tech and not really know binary or number bases other than 10.

Today was the first day of school for all NYC teachers. Students come back tomorrow. That's a quick turnaround. Some years, they get a day or two before the kids come in. That's much easier. The first day is usually dominated by meetings. In a large school like Stuy you'll typically have a long faculty meeting in the morning and a department meeting in the afternoon. Not much time to actually get ready for classes.

Classes started up again today so I thought I'd talk about my class rules. I don't seem to recall many class rules in college. Sure, there was a grading policy governing homework and the like but not much beyond that. In K12 there are usually more. When you can talk, how you set up your notebook, how to do homework, bathroom policy etc. For years, I've used the same set of class rules and I always talk about the rules with my classes.

Earlier today I was asked about my avatar: I've been using it for most services for a few months now. It's an image that I've had for ages. I started thinking about using it about a year ago So, what's the story? It was back in 1993. I had just started at Stuy. I taught some CS when I was at Seward Park but at the time, I was teaching all math at Stuy.

Writing about old projects got me thinking of my first programming gig and software longevity. It was a part time after school / full time summer job at Arcus-Simplex-Brown. I started in my senior year in high school and continued through most of my first year in college. It wasn't my first job - that was being a delivery boy at Video Room, an independent video store that's survived from the old VHS/Betamax days through DVDs and is still, somehow or other, surviving in this day and age of streaming video.

JCS's post on Irreal today brought me back. It was about Brief which was the editing hotness back in the day. I played with it a little really mostly used Emacs clones for real work when I was stuck on MS-DOS systems. Usually either JOVE or Epsilon In the comments Jon reminded me about the MKS Toolkit which brought most everyday Unix tools to DOS along with a shell and a version of Vi.

I've been following the tweets coming out of ICER2018. I've never been to ICER but now am thinking about trying to get funding to go next year. One set of tweets involved students writing or using APIs or Libraries. This overlaps with Owen Astrachan's talk from this past year's CSTA conference on sorting. I was planning on writing a post about Owen's talk but I thought I'd leave it for the school year closer to when sorting is typically covered.