seneca

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…

In my open source courses, I spend a lot of time working with new developers who are trying to make sense of issues on GitHub and figure out how to begin.  When it comes to how people write their issues, I see all kinds of styles.  Some people write for…

Today I read Mike Hoye's blog post about Mozilla's IRC server coming to an end.  He writes:Mozilla has relied on IRC as our main synchronous communications tool since the beginning...While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and  harassment for many of our…

Today I submitted my grades and completed another year of teaching.  I've spent the past few weeks marking student projects non-stop, which has included reading a lot of pull requests in my various open source courses.As a way to keep myself sane while I marked, I wrote some code…

Today one of my first year web students emailed me a question:Today when I was searching some questions on StackOverflow, I found their website turns to a really interesting display and can be changed to the regular one back and forth by a button on the top. I guess…