I've been having fun with this years Advent of Code competition. So far, I've been able to keep up but with I expect that to change in another couple of days since I'll be traveling for the weekend. After solving a problem, I like looking over some of the other solutions on the Advent of Code subreddit. Even with similar agorithmic solutions there's a decent amount of variation in the actual code and solutions in different languages can look radically different.

Yesterday I was one of the judges at StuyHacks. A one day hackathon at Stuyvesant run by and organized by the students. I don't have attendee stats but there were kids from all over the city and at least one team from New Jersey. The youngest student that I met was in sixth grade and the oldest were high school seniors. The judging was at the end but I decided to stop by earlier to see how the hackers were doing.

It's once again time for Advent of Code. That one a day programming competition that's been running now for three years. Here are some thoughts on day 1. The core of the problem is that you have a large string of digits and you have to calculate a checksum. This is done by adding the sum of a subset of the digits. Only the ones that are identical to the digit to their right.

A week or so ago I wrote about the event we had to kick off Hunter College's partnering with the NY tech community to build a Hunter to tech pipeline. Each table had two Hunter students and a group of tech professionals. Each table discussed the Hunter CS experience and how the tech community can help support the students. Towards the end of the event a colleague commented that it was a great idea to have the students essentially run the tables and how effective it was.

Thanksgiving is reunion season. Stuyvesant and I'm guessing other high schools traditionally hold their reunions, at least the five and ten year ones over the holiday weekend. It makes sense since grads who've moved away might still be coming to town for family celebrations. This year, I was invited to the Stuy07 ten year reunion. I considered crashing the Stuy97 20 year but it was at the same time and too far away.

The 38th installment of Using Emacs is about dired, Emacs' built in mode for navigating and working with directories. I'm not a dired power user and in fact am just now making a real effort to explore it and work it into my daily workflow and with that in mind, I'd love to hear some configuration and use suggestions from people who use it regularly. Here's the configuration I use:

Thks question was posed the other day - how can one get students to truly understand the quicksort algorithm? I've written a few posts about quicksort. The last time I did a lesson writeup on the subject I wrote about first looking and quickselect and then moving to the quicksort. The class was first faced with the problem of writing a routine to find the Kth smallest item in an unsorted data set.

One of my goals when I came over to Hunter was to help establish Hunter CS as the place to be for CS in the city. Hunter already had a solid CS program before I joined but it isn't well known. It also doesn't have an established tech culture. It's an ambitious goal but if it can be done, what a game changer. A lot of people talk about equity, diversity, and social justice but if we can establish Hunter as the place to be for CS in NY, what a win.

Most mornings, I start my day with a workout. Sometimes I run, sometimes I use my bike trainer. Dealing with plantar fasciitis since last June, it's mostly been the bike. I occupy the time by either watching YouTube videos or catching up on Communications of the ACM or American Scientist. I'm about 6 months behind on both. Inspired by some talk in one of the CS Ed Facebook groups, I thought I'd use the time to start going through some MOOCs.

Today was Election Day. One of the few days each year when students stay home and teachers spend all day attending what is generously known as professional development. Years ago I was in a room with a few colleagues when my friend Dave - one of the best math teachers I know said "you know, every time we have a PD day in NJ and my wife and I have to scramble to take care of the kids I get a little annoyed but then think I shouldn't get annoyed since they're spending the day doing all sorts of valuable PD.