I made a mistake recently. You'd think I'd know better (in fact, I do know better). Actually it's something I preach about so often, I thought I'd better do some penance in the form of a blog post.A colleague emailed me to tell me that all of her students'…
0.6 Release RequirementsI've just been going through the students' work for our 0.6 release of Telescope. In a previous post, I threw down a gauntlet and told the team I needed to be able to dogfood their code a staging server. Specifically, for 0.6 I said:I…
This week a number of the Telescope developers have been trying to nail down a design for our frontend, such that we can make progress on our 0.6 release, and as Cindy put it, "give @humphd his dog food."We've spent a lot of time doing code review, and…
Winter 2020 Teaching This term I'm teaching a bunch of introductory web programming classes (WEB222), and also the second open source course (OSD700, DPS911). I really enjoy teaching all of these courses, and doing them together is an interesting challenge.The courses are completely different, and exist at opposite ends…
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…