I wasn't going to go to this session. I started out in a panel on integrating social good into CS Ed. With the panel not meeting my expectations I moved over to my second choice - the system programming sessions where I saw Implementing Malloc: Students and Systems Programming, a paper presented by Brian Railing of CMU. I really liked both the paper and the talk. CMU computer science students all take a systems course that uses Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective.

I just got back from SIGCSE2018 - the big annual conference on computer science education. Although I've been in this racket for decades, this was only my second SIGCSE and once again I had a blast. As with most conferences, a highlight was the "hallway track" where I got to spend time with friends and colleagues from all over the country. I also got to check off a few names from the "people I've been following online and want to meet in person" list.

I like to listen to music at work. Sometimes I just stream from YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify or some other online source but if you're a person of a certain age, like me, you probably have quite an mp3 collection. All those CDs that have been ripped not to mention some converted vinyl. I used to use the Music Player Daemon or MPD back in the day. It would run in the background and you could connect to it using lots of clients.

With CS4All being the buzzword of the day we're paying a lot of attention to the fact that when we teach a CS class for all students, most of them won't end up studying CS or going directly into a tech heavy field. Among those that do study CS though, there is another division. Those studying CS as an academic exercise or to go on to graduate studies and those who are going in to the tech sector.

One day I'll do a Magit video but since there are already some good ones out there I thought I'd share a couple of other great git related packages. The first is Git Gutter which adds markers on the side gutter of your buffer so you know what's changed since you're last commit. I pretty much use it exclusively for that visual but it can also be used to cmmit and revert individual chunks of your changes.

Another Emacs quick hit today. Actually, not really Emacs. Today's video is a quick, really quick, look at Pandoc. Pandoc is a document converter. Here are the formats that Pandoc can covert read from: Markdown, CommonMark, PHP Markdown Extra, GitHub-Flavored Markdown, MultiMarkdown, and (subsets of) Textile, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, TWiki markup, TikiWiki markup, Creole 1.0, Haddock markup, OPML, Emacs Org mode, DocBook, JATS, Muse, txt2tags, Vimwiki, EPUB, ODT, and Word docx.

I make regular use of Google's office suite. I use Google forms all the time to collect data, Google docs when I have to leave Emacs for document preparation - usually when I have to collaborate with others online and I use Google Sheets as my greadebook. I don't do a lot of data processing using Google sheets. For that I download the data and write small scripts. On the other hand it turns out that you can do some pretty nifty things by scripting right in Google sheets.

Thanks to everyone who voted for topics or commented with suggestions for videos. I'll try to get to them in the coming months. Today is just a quick hit on Atomic Chrome - an Emacs package and browser extension that allows you to edit web form inputs with Emacs. UPDATE I forgot to mention that you can set a shortcut key, at least in chrome rather than clicking on the icon.

I thought I'd answer Alfred Thompson's recent post on using textbooks. Like Alfred, I've never used textbooks particularly effectively. Even when I taught math I mostly used them as a resource for problems. I also agree with Alfred in questioning the "flipped class" model or as I like to call it "homework" for reasons similar to Alfred's. Even back in the Pascal days of APCS getting textbooks was an ordeal in NYC.

Last week, Mark Guzdial asked What does it mean for Computer Science to be harder to learn than other STEM subjects? as a follow up to his ACM Blog post this month and the ensuing discussion. You should read both posts but here's how Mark started off the follow up: I made an argument in my Blog@CACM Post for this month that “Learning Computer Science is Different than Learning Other STEM Disciplines,” and on Twitter, I explicitly added “It’s harder.