Category Archives: Coding, Software Engineering, Computer Science

Jonathan Stray: “What should the digital public sphere do?”

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A fantastic piece from Jonathan Stray on “algorithm designers to dedicated curators to, yes, traditional on-the-scene pro journalists, a great many people in different fields now have a part in shaping the digital public sphere”: “What should the digital public sphere do?”.

Cathy Davidson: Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, algoRithms

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Cathy Davidson at DMLCentral posts a great piece on children learning code: “Why We Need a 4th R: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, algoRithms”:

…What is marvelous about algorithmic thinking and Webmaking is that you can actually see abstract thinking transformed into your own customized multimedia stories on the Web, offered to a community, and therefore contributing to the Web. Algorithmic thinking is less about “learning code” than “learning to code.” Code is never finished, it is always in process, something you build on and, in many situations, that you build together with others. Answers aren’t simply “right” guesses among pre-determined choices, but puzzles to be worked over, improved, and adapted for the next situation, the next iteration. You look at examples, you try your own, you run the program, you see if it works. If it doesn’t, you see where you started to go wrong, return to that place, and try something else. The better you become, the more possibilities open for you. Your motivation for learning isn’t to score in the 99th percentile on your end-of-grade exam but to have more complex, surprising, or beautiful results that you can work on and share with your friends. Isn’t that what all learning should be?

…As a “discipline” or profession, programming is anomalous in that it resists professional certification or licensing. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no professional certification or licensing for programmers. There’s no equivalent of a bar exam or a beautician’s certification, no equivalent of the nursing or public accountant’s license or the MBA. You’re as good as the last program you wrote.

If every elementary school child learned code, it would help them understand that the World Wide Web is vital for everyone because we make it. And if every child learned to code the way it is expected that they will learn the other R’s, we might have a side benefit of greater diversity in our tech worlds. I’d love to see Dora the Coder to encourage girls to play at Webcraft—and a Dora who could be of any race, from any culture, from any country, rich or poor. Our Web is better from full, open, democratized participation—and so is society.

Read the whole thing. I plan on being present at her fireside chat, hosted by Mozilla, on the 1st: “Teaching the fourth “r:” webmaking as a vital 21st century skill”.

Test Driven Infrastructure With Vagrant, Puppet and Guard

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Patrick Debois has written a terrific guide that I plan on following in “Test Driven Infrastructure with Vagrant, Puppet and Guard”.

Related:

Mozilla Webdev: Matthew Riley MacPherson: “Developing with Vagrant, Puppet, and playdoh”

Treehouse Agency: Steven Merrill: DrupalCamp Atlanta 2011: Prezi: “Better Local QA Testing with Vagrant and Puppet”

“We need to teach kids to code. All of them.”

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Andy Young writes the post I’ve been gearing up to, this is a great read, if you have children, of any age, take a few moments and read the whole thing: “Coding for Success”:

…The computer stands with the greatest developments in modern humanity (and has made many of the other great developments possible). Let’s not just brush over such a crass truism, though – what do we mean by this, exactly?

Computers are tools for automation – fundamentally of calculation (“computation”) but which can be applied to endless tasks, once we factor in the multitude of peripherals and interfaces now available. Computers help us automate and repeat the many complicated steps that make up the search for the answer to some of our hardest problems: whether that’s a biologist attempting to model a genome or an office administrator tasked with searching an endless archive of data.

The use of tools is a big part of what make us human, and the computer is humanity’s most powerful tool. When David beat Goliath or when today’s researcher makes a breakthrough, it’s the tools that help us win.

…Yet the majority of us are entirely dependent on a select few, to enable us to achieve what we want.

…The ability to code is what brings the power of computing to the masses. We need to break away from a culture where we consider people to be “technical” or “non-technical” – not everyone takes to literature or eloquent composition of prose, but we need to attack the phenomenon of the “non-technical” in the same way that we tackle illiteracy.