OOPSLA held an all-star panel (including Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler), earlier this year, on the must-read paper from Fred Brooks (included in the must-read book “Mythical Man-Month”) “No Silver Bullet — Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering”. Read the paper. Then read the panel’s transcript.
WikiWikiWeb: No Silver Bullet
Christian Johansen, author of Test-Driven Javascript, wrote a great intro to Emacs Lisp: “An introduction to Emacs Lisp”. One of the better one’s I’ve reviewed and it is one for the bookmarks.
Edouard Swiac posts a guide to “Hacking like a hacker on a Mac using iTerm2, tmux, emacs, irssi (and more).”. I’m using Solarized now in Emacs and Terminal and might come back to this to add a few more tweaks to my work environment.
entaroadun/hnpickup looks like a nice project to introduce you to some data mining application design patterns to follow any place. It uses Google App Engine and Python.
Shaneal Manek’s posted a piece on Java that is another one for the bookmarks (and one to experiment with if you aren’t familiar), that introduces some Sinatra or web.py capabilities to the Java crowd: The Modern Java Ecosystem (for the Sinatra or web.py lover).
Here goes his example project on Github.
mirnazim.org posts a fantastic intro to the ‘Python Ecosystem’ that is worth bookmarking and coming back to: Python Ecosystem – An Introduction. Discussion at Hacker News.
Here is some great Python related news: Adrian Holovaty is getting back involved with Django!.
Unfortunately too many will take the wrong lessons for their own ends: Be a Jerk: The Worst Business Lesson From the Steve Jobs Biography – Tom McNichol – Business – The Atlantic.
Don’t be an asshole. You’re not Steve Jobs, and even if you were, it doesn’t make it right.
“Quotes from Steve Jobs Lost Interview”:
“Learning to program teaches you how to think. Computer science is a liberal art.”
NPR.org: “Steve Jobs: ‘Computer Science Is A Liberal Art'”:
“In my perspective … science and computer science is a liberal art, it’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation and these computation devices”
Related:
YouTube: WGBH: “Steve Jobs 1990 Lost Interview Part 1”:
Reddit.com: “Want: a non-technical description of CS”
I’ve mentioned Scratch as a way to introduce children to programming, but it works just as well, maybe even more so, as a way of introducing teenagers and adults to programming! Don’t take it from me though, take it from Harvard’s CS50, by David J. Malan (who is fantastic in these lectures btw), which has adopted Scratch (it moves on to C and other languages and tools), to help students make some connections early on.
YouTube: “CS50 / Week 0: Friday”:
Harvard: CS50.tv
Academic Earth: “Introduction to Computer Science I”
Recently I had the pleasure of assisting someone who lives at Connelly House, managed by Project HOME, in bringing his music to YouTube. He was a 50ish year old man, suffering from disability, with no internet or real computing experience to go by, but he had a project. In the journey to produce that single video for YouTube, he learned some basic concepts around navigating the web, managing an email account, and using search, that empowered him not only to produce a single video, but to go on and produce over 30. Now, one experience does not a conclusive study make, but I came away from the this convinced that it is a technique I’d love to try with K-12 students, building an interactive story or video game, and along the way, having a goal for them to learn the basics of computational thinking, problem solving, and basic programming. The software to do this is free and with cloud-based storage (Dropbox) regular access to a basic machine in the home, the technology you need is already here.
This is not an original idea (I don’t believe in original ideas by the way), and there are many who have brought this up as a successful path to introduce programming in the past. Here go some great links to ponder:
Knowing and Doing: Eugene Wallingford: “Problems are the Thing”
Philip Greenspun: “Improving Undergraduate Computer Science Education”
Edutopia: “Project-Based Learning”