For the holidays this Christmas, our family rented a house near Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. We've had a wonderful time exploring the southern shore of Nova Scotia, eating its food, exploring its beaches (yes, even in winter), and snaking our way along its undulating shorelines. We did all of our Christmas…
This week I got a question from a student: Is it bad that I look at other peoples code when I try to solve problems with concepts I don't quite understand? This is a great question, and I'm glad that he felt safe to ask it. I wanted to write…
This week I had a discussion with my open source students in order to get a sense of where people were at with their work. One of the questions I had for them was, "What are you struggling with, what are you finding tricky?" Here's some of what…
I love Service Workers. I've written previously about my work to use them in Thimble. They've allowed us to support all of the web's dynamic loading mechanisms for images, scripts, etc., which wasn't possible when we only used Blob URLs. But as much as I love them, they add a…
Today one of my students wanted some help understanding how to solve a problem with git. I often find that students get stuck on the proper use of git's rebase, merge, pull, and fetch. They want to share and use commits from other repos, but can't quite get the commands…
Yesterday, on Remembrance Day, I travelled to Stratford to attend the funeral of my colleague and friend, Jordan Anastasiade. He passed away suddenly a few weeks ago, and I've been deeply saddened by it. Yesterday was filled with tears and hugs with many colleagues, and his friends, and family. I…
This week I've been thinking about ways in which GitHub could do a better job with projects and code as they age. Unfortunately, since technology is fundamentally about innovation, growth, and development, we don't tend (or want) to talk about decline, neglect, or endings. GitHub has some great docs on…
Today I received a phishing email. There's nothing unique about this, as I get them most days. Here's what this one looked like: I deleted it, and went on with my day. Then I started getting emails from colleagues who had clicked the link: This is a simulated phishing test…
This week I'm talking with my open source students about bugs. Above all, I want them to learn how The Bug is the unit of work of open source. Learning to orient your software practice around the idea that we incrementally improve an existing piece of code (or a new…
Let me start by saying that I'm a huge fan of open source projects putting a Good-First-Bug type label on issues. From my own experience over the past decade trying to get students engaged in open source projects, it's often a great way to quickly find entry points for new…