I've been thinking about how much I favour measurements in time vs. size and how the shift to a chronological perspective allows me to overcome my fear of engaging with large tasks. This week a few things have overlapped in my mind to reinforce this idea.First, during my summer…
I've written recently about my work on ChatCraft.org. I've been doing a bunch of refactoring and new feature work, and things are in a pretty good state. It mostly works the way I'd expect now. Taras and Steven have filed a bunch of good ideas related to sharing, saving,…
I've been continuing my experiments with AI development. I wrote previously about my attempts to use ChatGPT more intentionally, as a way to better understand how my students are encountering it. Since then, I've been focusing on contributing to https://chatcraft.org/ and wanted to talk about what it is…
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…
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 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…
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…
Today I've completed another semester of teaching open source, and wanted to write something about what happened, experiments I tried, and what I learned.This fall I taught the first of our two open source classes, cross-listed in our degree and diploma programs as OSD600 and DPS909. This course focuses…
I've been working on some RSS/Atom blog aggregation software with my open source students. Recently we got everything working, and it let me do an analysis of the past 15 years of blogging by my students.I wanted to answer the question, "What is a blog post?" That is,…
I've been marking student submissions in my open source course this weekend, and with only a half-dozen more to do, the procrastinator in me decided a blog post was in order.Once again I've asked my students to participate in Hacktoberfest. I wrote about the experience last year, and wanted…