Children Should Learn Programming Along With Reading and Writing

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”

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.

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).

Thought Provokers From Python’s Guido Van Rossum and Clojure’s Rich Hickey

At Strange Loop 2011 Clojure’s Rich Hickey gave a presentation (video) on programming and simplicity that rankled some feathers and triggered a heated discussion at reddit.

Duncan McGreggor, decided to contact Python’s Guido Van Rossum to interview him about his keynote talk at PyCon US 2012 (video), specifically his thoughts on callbacks.

Talk: “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”

Allen Wirfs-Brock, a Mozilla Research Fellow, at YOW 2011, defined what he considers the current era of computing, and some exciting elements of where we are and where we are going in his talk “The Web Browser is a Transitional Technology”.

It looks like YOW 2011 had some fantastic talks to check out.

Al Sweigart: “Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program”

Author of “Invent with Python”, Al Sweigart, makes the case for teaching programming skills while enabling children to accomplish something, like making a game, not as an end in and of itself, in “Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program”. I believe this is mostly true, and the sooner we approach K-12 CS education similarly the better.