Today we're shipping our second release of Starchart.  During this release the team added more than 4K lines of new code, greatly expanding our core APIs and UIs.  Here are some of the highlights.We've made significant progress on our SSL Certificate request flow and API.  Denes has put a…

Later today we're going to be shipping our first release of Starchart, our custom-domain and certificate web app for the Seneca community.  I was telling my boss about it this week, and she was interested to hear that our students are building all this.  I wanted to talk about what…

I'm in the process of developing a demo for my students.  I need to show them how we'll do Docker based deployments in the cloud, and I wanted to quickly create a small cluster of VMs on my M1 MacBook Pro.  I debated doing it in AWS, but decided that…

I've spent the past few months building programs with GPT-3.  It's amazing and it's forcing me to rethink so much about how I write code or approach problems.  I was first inspired to try using it after reading Simon's great post about how to get started. Since then I have…

Tomorrow I'm starting the Winter 2023 term.  I thought I'd give a brief update on what I'm teaching, and my plans.This term I'm teaching WEB222 (intro to web programming), CCP555 (cloud computing for programmers using AWS), and OSD700/DPS11 (open source project).The web and cloud courses are going…

Over the last few weeks, I've been doing some work to plan a new open source project called Starchart.  The idea behind it is to solve a problem that a lot of us teaching programming have, namely, to make it easy and cheap (read "free!") for students to create custom…

Recently I've been working with some students as they debug their programs and reflecting on their approaches.  Most thrash wildly when something doesn't work, sure that if they just do this-one-thing, or that, everything will work!  They cast madly about for the magical StackOverflow- or Google-incantation that will put their…

My open source students are beginning Hacktoberfest this week and already the DMs are coming in with a familiar question: "Is this issue big enough? Is this too simple?" I understand the question, since I explicitly ask that students work in real open source projects, avoiding those repos…

This week I've been talking with a number of students in my cloud computing course who all have a similar bug.  They are making network requests to a REST API endpoint, and instead of getting back the expected JSON result, they get an error about the JSON parser not being…