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…
The JavaScript ecosystem has been benefiting lately from pieces of its dev tooling being (re)written in Rust. Projects like swc, Parcel 2 and parcel-css, deno, dprint and others have brought us tremendous performance improvements with tasks like bundling, formatting, etc. Recently, my favourite Rust-based, HTTP testing tool gained the…
I'm beginning another term today, and the majority of what I'm teaching this time is Cloud Computing using AWS. I spent a good part of 2021 researching and developing this course, and taught it for the first time during the winter semester. Now that I've arrived at the "teach it…
"The more I practice, the better I will become" --Thanh Van"Send a PR up and then lets start collaborating" --Tim Roberts"whether you're a student or not, there's always something to learn" --Abdul GuledNearly a month since my previous Telescope update, I'm back with another story to tell, this…
"shipping software is an endless job" – James Mai"I watched in awe through screen-share" – Tim Roberts"the train will leave the station, and there will be another train." – Amasia NalbandianThis week I was trying to describe what online teaching is like, and it's hard to sum up in a few…
I am not really sure how, but we are doing a lot for release 2.6! – Diana BelokonSo much has happened in week 3 for OSD700, and I had quite enjoyed it all – Roxanne LeeWe are now at version 2.5.4. Our fourth patch release in the span of…
My programming students had deadlines this weekend and I've been chatting with quite a few of them on GitHub, Slack, and Teams about their misbehaving programs. I've been interested to see how some approach problems with their code, and I'm reflecting on how to go about teaching the others to…