Today I've been reading and marking student blog posts and git commits for a recent lab. One of the comments I've made over and over again is to ask students to include links to everything they discuss. I've had to say it so many times now that I wanted to…

Today I wanted to give some credit to our government.  No, not the elected officials, about whom I have very little that's positive to say, especially during Covid.  Instead, I'm talking about the team who just shipped Ontario's Covid-19 Verification app.  I don't actually know who they are, but I…

This past week I've been fascinated to watch my students work in each other's repos. They have very different ways of approaching code they didn't write.  For the most part it goes well, but some are more successful, and it's useful to consider why that might be so.For example,…

Twice in the past week I've seen projects I'm working on go off the rails when an automatic, seemingly minor, dependency update didn't do what it advertised.First, it's helpful to understand something about how packages are versioned in the node.js/JavaScript ecosystem.  By and large, such projects use…

This week's open source lab has the students reviewing each other's code on GitHub.  I've purposely given every student the same programming problem so that they would a) all have the same knowledge about the problem space; b) get to see how another person might solve it in a totally…

This week I've begun teaching my introductory open source course again. Throughout the week I've been meeting the new students on Slack, and getting to know a bit more about them via their blogs.  I thought I'd write about some of what I learned.Many students have told me that…

In a few hours I'll be meeting with the team to ship another major release (2.0) of the Telescope project.  It's been a lot of work, full of late night debugging sessions over Slack and Teams, major successes as we've landed big features, and plenty of disappointments as we've…

Yesterday the team shipped Telescope 1.9.5, and brought us one step closer to our 2.0 goals.  I spent a lot of time mentoring, debugging, reviewing, and also writing code in this release, and wanted to write about a few aspects of what we did and how it…

I collaborate on content with a lot of different people.  As a software developer, almost all of my work is done in git and GitHub.  As a professor working at a large institution, most of it is done in Microsoft Office, email, or increasingly, in Teams.  Lately I've been thinking…