Archive for September, 2008

Win a Trip to Boulder (and Get a Job)

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

From http://boulder.me: Want a FREE trip to beautiful Boulder, Colorado? The Boulder tech scene is growing like crazy. Twenty of our top tech startups have banded together to fly in one hundred top software developers, programmers and engineers from across the country, all expenses paid. You can apply to be one ...

Change the Rules, Change the Outcome

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008

Via Andy Lumsdaine, some practical ideas about how to make open source development less unwelcoming for women. I'd be very interested in hearing from projects that have tried some of these out.

Another Use for Extensible Programming

Friday, September 19th, 2008

I've grumbled before about the fact that mass-market tools like Firefox and Microsoft Word allow people to mix pictures and text, but programmers' editors (including IDEs) do not.  My standard answer when people ask why I'd want that is, "So that I can put before and after pictures of data ...

If It’s on the Web…

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

...it must be (almost) real: our introduction to Computer Science using Python is now listed on Amazon.  Yay!

Risk Budget

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

Ward Cunningham coined the phrase "technical debt" to describe the situation where poor design and/or implementation results in developers paying "interest" in the form of extra maintenance or other work that doesn't add value for users.  Inspired by that, I've started asking my students to think about the "risk budget" ...

Startup Nation November 13-14

Thursday, September 18th, 2008

"Canada's Conference for Startups" --- Jevon MacDonald has the details.  Hope to see lots of you there!

I Used To Make Jokes…

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

...about having a Cray of my own --- now I almost could.

Comments in JSON?

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

Some of my students have discovered that JSON doesn't support comments --- they're not in the syntax diagram on the json.org home page or the RFC, and various discussion threads bemoan their absence.  We'd like to use JSON both for data interchange and for specifying test fixtures; we could live ...

Life? Don’t Talk to Me About Life…

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

From Jon Pipitone, unprompted, very early this morning:

REST APIs for Batch Operations

Monday, September 15th, 2008

I have a question about the "right" way to design a REST API, and am hoping someone out there on the Interweb will point me in the right direction. The short version of the question is, "How should batch operations be structured?" The long version goes something like ...