Earlier today I read this post by Eliot Horowitz, founder and CTO of MongoDB. Eliot titled the post "Innovate vs Appropriate" and talks about the importance of knowing when to come up with something new vs when to use the accepted tool, technique, or method. Eliot, of course is discussing this as it applies to MongoDB and it's well worth a read but it got me thinking about the ever popular need to "disrupt" education.

Happy to be back after a couple of weeks. My wife and son spent some time in San Francisco, Mountain View, and Seattle. The main reason was to see our daughter who's interning out there for the summer but it was also a great opportunity to catch up with over 100 former students. If you're interested in seeing more, I wrote a bit about it here. I was originally going to start talking about Python development but then saw this post on reddit about reveal.

If I look at my leaving Stuyvesant and the NYC Department of Education to join Hunter College as the end of Act I of my teaching career, then our family's West Coast swing was a nice way to pull down the curtain. The impetus for the trip was visiting Batya - she's interning at Facebook this summer and having an absolute blast. The plan was to spend a few days in San Francisco, then a little south to Mountain View, where Batya was staying, and then fly up to Seattle for a couple of days.

I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks so I probably won't have time for another video until mid to late July. I'll probably write a post about this series and do some regular blogging over that time but probably no new videos for a couple of weeks. Also, a couple of notes about the series: Instead of making a separate git branch for each episode, I'm just adding on to the master branch on GitHub.

Yesterday I read over Hillary's briefing on her initiative on Technology and Innovation. A lot of it sounds good but, at least for the education piece, I have my doubts. My feeling is that she's pretty much aligned with the current administration education wise and the current administration has been as bad if not worse than the previous with respect to public education. While I have issues with some of the education pieces and very much like some of the others, I don't want to get into that today.

Yesterday over at AVC Fred blogged about the AFSE graduation and posted a transcript of the speech he gave. It's well worth a read. Some of the comments touched on mentors and role models so I though I'd talk a little about that here. I've always believed that as a parent, modeling - that is, how we behave is one of the largest shapers of our kids. It's one thing to take your kid to a museum because that's what you should do as a good parent and another if you think - "I wants to go to that museum and damn it, I'm taking you along.

Now that we have a nice basic configuration, let's make Emacs look a little nicer. Like most editors, Emacs can be extensively themed. As shown in the video, you can quickly see the built in themes using the customize-themes command. You can load one of these themes by using the load-theme command interactively or, more likely by putting: (load-theme 'leuven t) in your init.el. The above code loads the built in leuven theme.

Out of the box, Emacs supports various types of completion. Tab completion for filenames and commands basically work right out of the box and Emacs has built in modes like Abbrev, Hippie Expand, and Dabbrev provide a manner of completion for in buffer text. I briefly show Dabbrev (Dynamic Abbrevs) in the video and if you're interested in the others, follow the links. We saw ow the built in Ido mode and third party packages like Ivy, which I prefer, and Helm make for better completions on functions, filenames, and the like and Emacs also has third party packages for in buffer completion.

Here's a really cool navigation method that I've been meaning to use more. Avy is a replacement for ace-jump mode which is an implementation of easymotion, a vim plugin. It's pretty cool and lets you quickly navigate to any spot on the screen. After triggering avy, or more specifically the avy-goto-char function, emacs prompts you for a single character. When you type it, all instances of the character that start out words change to a highlighted letter.

I spent last Saturday up at the Microsoft offices in Times Square observing a TEALS training session. My fried Nathaniel Granor, Teals Regional Manager in the east has invited me a number of times and this time I was able to make it. If you don't know, TEALS is a program that takes volunteers in the tech industry and places them in classrooms. Unlike other programs, the TEALS volunteers work with the teachers while the kids learn some CS.