Boing Boing posts a TEDx talk from Mitch Resnick, of the MIT Media Lab, and creator of Scratch, and a good discussion ensued: “Kids should learn programming as well as reading and writing”. Make sure to watch the talk as well: “Reading, Writing, and Programming: Mitch Resnick at TEDxBeaconStreet”
Category Archives: Coding, Software Engineering, Computer Science
NPR posts a news app HOWTO, along with code
NPR.org: “How to build a news app that never goes down and costs you practically nothing”.
Python (Flask, Fabric, Jinja) and Amazon EC2. A nice walk through with code for contribution and reuse.
The World’s Youngest Programmer?
Discovery News: Meet the Youngest Video Game Programmer:
A bright young programmer from Philadelphia recently unveiled a video game involving ballerinas, jewels and vampires — sure to be a hit with young girls. The programmer herself also happens to be seven years old.
Zora Ball, a first grader at the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia, created the video game in a class focused on science, technology, engineering and mathematics led by Tariq Al-Nasir, who heads the STEMnasium Learning Academy.
Checkout Zora’s story at Discovery News.
Favorite Reads for 2012
Following is a list of books, essays, and articles I read (or re-read) which feel worth sharing or re-sharing on on New Years Eve:
Books
“Thinking in Systems: A Primer”, by Donella H. Meadows
“Release It!”, by Michael T. Nygard
“Language in Thought and Action”, by S.I. Hayakawa, Alan R. Hayakawa, and Robert MacNeil
“The Stars My Destination”, by Alfred Bester
“One, Two, Three: Absolutely Elementary Mathematics”, by David Berlinski
“Information Diet”, by Clay Johnson
“The Great Stagnation”, by Tyler Cowen
“One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic”, by Lawrence Lessig
“The Waste Land”, by T.S. Eliot
“Race Against The Machine”, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.
Software Engineering Related Essays, Posts and Papers
“Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction”, by Bret Victor
“Analogy as the Core of Cognition”, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
“On Being a Senior Engineer”, by John Allspaw
“Quality With a Name”, by James Shore
“Out of the tar pit”, by Ben Moseley
“Paxos Made Moderately Complex”, by Robbert van Renesse
“How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet”, Gizmodo
“The Future is Hypermedia APIs”, by Mike Taczak
“Ubiquitous Programming with Pen and Paper”, by Awelon Blue
“Leverage Points: : Places to Intervene in a System”, by Donella Meadows
“Unicorns and Strong Typing”, by Michael Bevilacqua-Linn
“Big Ball of Mud”, by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder
“Intrinsic and Incidental Complexity”, by Noah Sussman
“An Introduction to Graphviz via R. Kelly’s ‘Trapped in the Closet’ Hip Hopera”, by Rob Rhinehart
“Damn Cool Algorithms: Log structured storage”, by Nick Johnson
“The Humble Programmer”, by Edsger W. Dijkstra
“Simple Made Easy”, by Rich Hickey
“The Long Tail of Technical Debt”, by Michael Feathers
“The Carrying Cost of Code: Taking Lean Seriously”, by Michael Feathers
“No Silver Bullet”, by Fred Brooks
Making A Difference with Software Engineering
“Homegrown Computer Science for Middle Schoolers”, by Tess Rinearson
“Blue Collar Coder”, by Anil Dash
“Government As A Platform”, by Tim O’Reilly
“How Do Committees Invent?”, by Mel Conway
“Anyone can do it. Data journalism is the new punk”, by Simon Rogers, The Guardian
“I believe a computer program can stand in…”, by Lisa Williams
“How Team Obama’s tech efficiency left Romney IT in dust”, Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica
“How To Tell A Story With Code”, by Rob Spectre
“Urban Storytelling with Open Data”, by Mark Headd
“Making Philadelphia Better Together”, by Mark Headd, Programs & Technology, Office of the Managing Director, City of Philadelphia
Society, Governance, History, Health, Art and Music
“The Condition: Chronic Self-Disclosure”, by Bethlehem Shoals, The Awl
“The Busy Trap”, by Tim Kreider, NYTimes
“The Web We Lost”, by Anil Dash
“A Self-Made Man Looks At How He Made It”, by John Scalzi
“Laws of Physics Can’t Trump the Bonds of Love”, by Tara Parker-Pope, NYTimes
“What I’ve Learned About Learning”, by Reginald Braithwaite
“The Builders Manifesto”, by Umair Haque
“How Will You Measure Your Life”, by Clayton M. Christensen
“When They’re Grown, the Real Pain Begins”, by Susan Engel, NYTimes
“Sincerity, Not Irony, Is Our Age’s Ethos”, by Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, The Atlantic
“Young Worf”, GregOttawa, Reddit
“Believe You Can Change”, by Aaron Swartz
“Going Numb In The Summer Of The Gun”, by Jen Doll, The Atlantic
“Horatio Alger, RIP”, by Jim Tankersley, National Journal
“The 10 Doctors”, by Rich Comics
“Looking back at Star Trek: The Next Generation on its 25th anniversary”, by Brian Phillips, Grantland
“Babies Are Born Scientists”, by NSF.gov
“America, The Fixable”, The Atlantic
A letter from Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell on Republican Government
“Welcome to Hell: Philadelphia Has a Serious Case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”, by Steve Volk, Philadelphia Magazine
“You Can Feel The Difference”, Nathaniel Popkin, Hidden City Philadelphia
“Poverty, College and A Dream Deferred”, by Chris Lehmann, Practical Theory
“Clinging to the Skin of this Tiny Little World (The TV Movie)”, by Philip Sandifer, TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue
Recent Python packaging reads
Python packaging options are so varied, so strongly disputed as to what is ‘best’ or ‘correct’ or ‘the past’ that they are as un-Pythonic as can be. I love Python, but when it comes to packaging, well lets say I understand how Armin Ronacher feels.
- Python Ecosystem – An introduction – mirnazim.org
- How I learned to stop worrying & love Python Packaging – Jannis Leidel – Slideshare
- Building and Distributing Packages with setuptools – PEAK
- Taming your dependencies with pip – Carl J Meyer – github
- What is softwares in Python which are alternative to Ruby’s bundler / Perl’s carton? – Stack Overflow
- The Hitchiker’s Guide to Packaging
- Why use pip over easy_install? – Stack Overflow
- Python Packaging: Hate, hate, hate everywhere – Armin Ronacher
- Poster on the future of Python packaging for PyCon US 2012
- Python Deployment Anti-Patterns
- Tools of the Modern Python Hacker: Virtualenv, Fabric and Pip
One tip: Never, ever, ever use easy_install (except to install virtualenv and pip). If you are going to install or define an .egg, do so with setuptools or distribute. Again: Don’t use easy_install.
Greg Laden: “Is Python The New Basic?”
Greg Laden recently posted some thoughts about “Python for Kids”, a book by Jason Briggs. Recently I discovered the turtle module, which is heavily used in the book, is included in the standard Python distribution when I tripped upon a tutorial at the Open Book Project. I’m going to have to buy the book and give it a try with Emma.
Ryan Henson Creighton & Cassandra Creighton Teaching Children to Code
YouTube: TEDxToronto: Ryan Henson Creighton & Cassandra Creighton:
Make sure to check out Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and have some fun.
Some Software Engineering Humor and Wisdom
A video and a post from some friends of mine:
Jon Moore: Video: “Every discussion about REST Ever”
Michael Bevilacqua-Linn: “Unicorns and Strong Typing”.
Mozilla’s Save For Later
The team at Mozilla posted a great piece documenting their idea and design process for what may be a new feature set in Firefox: “Save For Later”.
John Allspaw: “On Being A Senior Engineer”
Absolutely one of the best posts on what I consider to be the responsibilities of my work and what I aspire to practice, John Allspaw has written required reading for anyone looking to become a Senior Engineer or anyone who wants to grow into a better one: “On Being A Senior Engineer” (via rc3.org).