A few days ago, I saw a piece on David Heinemeier Hansson's tweet on whiteboard interviews: Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. — DHH (@dhh) February 21, 2017 I'm not a huge fan of the whiteboard interview but I think many of the tweets missed the point.

This video is specifically for my students or any students out there who are starting with C++ and emacs. The videos also longer than usual, coming in at a little over 20 minutes. The big difference is instead of building on my existing config, the code at the bottom is a complete standalone configuration. It's all pulled from the main config with one additional package. By taking the code at the bottom and putting in into a file named init.

In part 2 I talked about how I used Hyrdas to quickly navigate through elfeed tags. It was a nice step up but the fact that I still had to manually edit my configuration code for every new tag to update the hydra was a problem. Basically, I had to somehow or other, take a list of all the active tags and with it build a defhydra command that will then make my Hydra.

If we properly prepare CS teachers, won't they just jump ship and take tech industry jobs? I hear that a lot. Tech pays big. Teaching? Not so much. Tech workers are respected and have flexible jobs. Teaching? Again, not so much. Those chanting these refrains advocate the current simple teacher "training" - scripted lessons, minimal pedagogical content knowledge, even less real content knowledge. That will keep them in the classroom.

In part 1, I talked about elfeed, a really awesome feed reader for emacs. Generally, I'm really liking it but there's been one problem - not being able to navigate quickly between groups of feeds with a keystroke or two. It's emacs so there has to be a solution. Enter hydra - a terrific emacs package from the same guy who brought us swiper, another one of my favorite emacs packages.

Since the demise of Google Reader, I've been using Feedly to read my streams. Feedly's a nice product and it's been working well for me for quite some time. A few days ago, I decided to see what emacs had to offer on the feed reader front. One solution was Gnus but then I've never been able to get my head around Gnus. Another was elfeed. I thought I'd give elfeed a go.

I've been planning to put together a response to Alfred Thompson's recent post - Software Developers - Quantity vs Quality. TL;DR, although it isn't really long and I do encourage you to read Alfred's post: a couple of articles talk about how the U.S. has the most people entering CS competitions like HackerRank but Americans are not at the top of the leaderboard. does this mean that there's less talent in America?

Scheme is one of the languages used in Stuy's intro CS course. Like any other language, there are pros and cons of using it to introduce students to CS. Here are some of the reasons why I like Scheme as a first language and why despite that, I don't recommend it in many cases. Scheme certainly isn't mainstream. That's not the main reason why I like it but it is a side benefit.

I was catching up with the team at Stuy the other day and they mentioned that they were periodically getting pushback on their choice of languages, particularly in the intro class. The pushback was mostly in the form of "why don't you start them with Javascript?" Back in the day, when I created our intro class where we use Scheme, NetLogo and then later Python, I'd get similar pushback but then it was "why not Java?

One of my favorite but little used emacs features is rectangular editing. It's little used because I don't need it all that often. It's one of my favorites because when I do need it, it's just so amazingly useful. The idea is you can mark a rectangle of text, cut it and later paste it. This means that if you have three columns of text: a b c d e f g h i j k l You can easily mark the middle column (b e h k) or even just the b e and h, cut it and paste it elsewhere as a rectangle.