This week I'm looking at standards with my open source class. I find that students often don't know about standards and specs, how to read them, how they get created, or how to give feedback and participate. The process is largely invisible. The timing of this topic corresponds to a…
I sat down to write a post about my students' experiences this term contributing to open source, and apparently I've written this before (and almost exactly a year ago to the day!) The thing about teaching is that it's cyclic, so you'll have to forgive me as I give a…
Yesterday I was looking at a bug with some students. It related to a problem in a file search feature: a user found that having a folder-name surrounded with braces (e.g., {name}) meant that no search results were ever reported within the folder. "This isn't a bug,"…
I was reflecting the other day how useful it would be if GitHub, in addition to the lists it has now like Trending and Explore, could also provide me a better view into which projects a) need help; and more, b) can accept that help when it arrives. Lots of…
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…