Today I've completed another semester of teaching open source, and wanted to write something about what happened, experiments I tried, and what I learned.This fall I taught the first of our two open source classes, cross-listed in our degree and diploma programs as OSD600 and DPS909. This course focuses…
I've been working on some RSS/Atom blog aggregation software with my open source students. Recently we got everything working, and it let me do an analysis of the past 15 years of blogging by my students.I wanted to answer the question, "What is a blog post?" That is,…
I've been marking student submissions in my open source course this weekend, and with only a half-dozen more to do, the procrastinator in me decided a blog post was in order.Once again I've asked my students to participate in Hacktoberfest. I wrote about the experience last year, and wanted…
Recently, my already impossibly long commute was made longer. Our department got shuffled between campuses, and with the move came the chance to spend even more time in my car. I've been finding purpose for this new found time by listening to a ton of audiobooks using the Libby app.…
In my open source courses, I spend a lot of time working with new developers who are trying to make sense of issues on GitHub and figure out how to begin. When it comes to how people write their issues, I see all kinds of styles. Some people write for…
Today I read Mike Hoye's blog post about Mozilla's IRC server coming to an end. He writes:Mozilla has relied on IRC as our main synchronous communications tool since the beginning...While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our…
Today I submitted my grades and completed another year of teaching. I've spent the past few weeks marking student projects non-stop, which has included reading a lot of pull requests in my various open source courses.As a way to keep myself sane while I marked, I wrote some code…
Today one of my first year web students emailed me a question:Today when I was searching some questions on StackOverflow, I found their website turns to a really interesting display and can be changed to the regular one back and forth by a button on the top. I guess…
This week I've asked my open source students to research three new (to them) projects. In the spirit of walking-the-talk, I wanted to share three that I found recently.I'm constantly looking at new projects and repos. I love GitHub's Trending feed, and discovering new things via Twitter, podcasts, and…
This past week one of my open source students was presenting on a bug she'd fixed in a big project. Toward the end of her demo, she made an off-hand comment about how a maintainer had included her fix, but not the commit itself. Her code found its way into…