This morning I've been reading various posts about the difficulty ahead for the Pointer Events spec, namely, Apple's (and by extension Google's) unwillingness to implement it. I'd encourage you to read both pieces, and whatever else gets written on this in the coming days. I want to comment not on…
This term I've got a good group of students taking my second open source course. Unlike the first course, which aims to teach the theory and practice of open source, the second course aims to get students engaged with a larger piece of work. During the fall I was chatting…
One of the personal experiments I'm considering in 2015 is a conscious movement away from video-based participation in open source communities. There are a number of reasons, but the main one is that I have found the preference for "realtime," video-based communication media inevitably leads to ever narrowing…
This week in class I was discussing the value of thinking in terms of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and how open source tends to favour the approach, because it allows one to ship, test things with real users, get feedback quickly, find and fix bugs, and repeat. Structuring your…
One of the techniques I've used over the years in teaching open source is to invite core members of the projects we're working within to come and give guest lectures. I do this for a variety of reasons. First, I find that students are intimidated by the size and complexity…
In recent days our CDOT Blog Planet has begun having issues. Chris was able to determine that we have many feed URLs that are no longer active. Today I wrote and ran a script to check all of the feeds in the list, and removed any that were not found,…
I've been lax in my blogging for the past number of months (apologies). I've had my head down in a project that's required all of my attention. On Friday we reached a major milestone, and I gave a demo of the work on the weekly Webmaker call. Afterward David Ascher…
Last week I finally made some time to rebuild my blog. The server it ran on died in the fall, and I haven't had the time to properly get it back up. From 2006 until the end of 2013, vocamus.net/dave ran on a WordPress instance hosted faithfully by…