Last winter I worked with an excellent group of students to develop and release Telescope 1.0. This year I'm gearing up for another round of development, shipping a 2.0 Release with a new group of equally gifted students.I'm not 100% clear what our goals are yet for…
tldr; I made you a little birding web app for Christmas with Begin.com and Next.js to help you find Snowy Owls in Canada. The code is here.On the Healing Powers of a Side ProjectI've finally finished the semester, and am ready for a holiday. The past three…
I'm happy to announce that tonight we have released Telescope version 1.4.0. This was a big release, and included contributions from 36 new contributors to the project. A huge thank-you to everyone who was involved in this release!Here are some highlights of what we shipped:Many large…
I wrote previously about what an amazing year this has been for seeing owls in our woods. In fact birding in general has been so good that my wife has started calling this our "Large" Year, as a play on the idea of doing a Big Year when you can't…
This has been one of my best years for seeing owls. With the exception of 2017, when I saw a dozen Snowy Owls, I've seen an owl two or three times a week during the pandemic. A big part of this is the family of Great Horned owls that moved…
This week I began teaching another round of our introductory Open Source courses, DPS909 and OSD600. Despite our new online reality, I've got the largest group I've ever had, which is a bit intimidating (especially since this isn't my only course).Teaching online has lots of challenges, but in the…
I was chatting with a student today who couldn't figure out why his scripts wouldn't run. He was doing everything correctly, but still the commands failed with a bizarre error. I asked to see the output. Here's an approximation:PS C:\Users\student\OneDrive\Computer Programming\Assignments & Tests\assignment4&…
I've always wanted an excuse to try working with Twilio for programmatic messaging and SMS. This week I got my chance, and wanted to share some of what I learned.One of the many side projects I maintain is an IoT system I've been cobbling together for my family and…
In December I wrote about an experiment I'd started to build a blog aggregation project with my open source students:In the winter term I'm going to continue working on [Telescope] in the second course, and take [the students] through the process of shipping it into production. Moving from fixing…
Last week was a shortened week, with the Easter Friday holiday, but I wanted to write about some of what I saw and experienced "online" during week 3 of covid19-teaching.This was the final week of classes, and we only have one more week of "final assessments," which look different…