On Owls
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…
Teaching and Thinking Globally
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…
On Boring Paths
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&…
Experimenting with Twilio
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…
Telescope 1.0, or "Dave is once again asking for a blog"
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…
Online, Week 3
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…
Git and Preparing for a 1.0
We're getting close to our goal of shipping Telescope 1.0. As you get close to a big release, a few things happen. First, a lot of things suddenly get finished and merges increase (you know the saying, "the last 10% is 90% of the work"). Second, the need for…
On Teaching Online, Week 2
I'm finishing up my second full week of 100% remote, online delivery of my courses. It's hard to identify everything I'm feeling, not least because my personal and professional life are now so interconnected by a global health and economic crisis. I do know that I'm deeply tired.One thing…
NSSSSSSO: Not So Simple Seneca SAML SSO
This week in Telescope development we hit a major milestone. For the first time we were able to authenticate users in our app using Seneca's Single Sign-On (SSO) SAML authentication provider. We even got Single Logout to work (don't ask me why that's even harder than login).One of our…
Teaching in the time of Corona
Like so many of my post-secondary colleagues around the world, I've been trying to figure out what it means to conduct the remainder of the Winter 2020 term in a 100% online format. I don't have an answer yet, but here is some of what I'm currently thinking.CancelledIt seems…