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…
I wanted to pause for a moment in order to reflect on one of the more interesting things I heard from a student last week. I often begin my open source classes by asking students why they are there. What is "open source", I want to know, since most haven't…
Yesterday Pomax DM'ed me on Twitter to let me know he'd archived the Processing.js GitHub repo. He's been maintaining it mostly on his own for quite a while, and now with the amazing p5js project, there isn't really a need to keep it going. I spent the rest of…
This term I'm teaching two sections of our Topics in Open Source Development course. The course aims to take upper-semester CS students into open source projects, and get them working on real-world software. My usual approach is to put the entire class on the same large open source project. I…
This week I was doing an experiment to see if I could automate a build step in a project I'm working on, which requires binary resources to be included in a web app. I'm building a custom Linux kernel and bundling it with a root filesystem in order to embed…
Since writing my post about good-first-bug vs. good-first-experience I've been experimenting with different approaches to creating useful walkthroughs. I think I've settled on a method that works well, and wanted to write about it, so as to encourage others to do the same. First, a refresher on what I mean…