Archive for July, 2009
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Now that the Software Carpentry course is over, it's time to get back to planning projects for the fall, and there's good news on two fronts. The first is that we had a very productive meeting on Tuesday about projects using the City of Toronto's data. The CUPE strike may ...
Posted in Basie, Student Projects, Teaching | No Comments »
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Via Joey deVilla, the schedule for Microsoft TechDays 2009. Lots of cool stuff; I probably won't be able to go, but I hope some students will.
Posted in Announcements | No Comments »
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
July 29, 2009, was the second really good day I've had since I started this job. In the morning, our summer students did demos that were as good as anything shown at DemoCamp 21. In the afternoon, six very smart and very eloquent people talked to an audience of about ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Toronto's 21st DemoCamp was held last night in the Rogers Theatre. I enjoyed it: it was good to see friends, and great to see what's going on in Toronto's tech community. Here's my rundown:
Venue: better than the pub we were in the last couple of times, but banked seating (and ...
Posted in DemoCamp | 4 Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
I've created an Amazon.com Listmania list of the books I think are most directly related to the material in the Software Carpentry course. Several important topics aren't represented, including:
Version control
Automated builds
Processing XML
Processing binary data
Web client programming
Web server programming
There are good books on all of these, but the ones I know ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
Like many software developers of a certain age, I had a brief love affair with UML in the 1990s. Pictures of programs---what a great way to communicate! In my case, it lasted about four months. I simply didn't find class diagrams helped me understand what was going on in my ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
I'm going to teach a bit of web programming to the Software Carpentry students this week, so I went to the Programmable Web site to find a simple API to use in examples. Guess what? "Science" isn't listed as a category---the closest thing is "medical". *sigh*
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
Via Jon Pipitone, two excellent examples of someone critiquing their own code online (in this case, stuff written for the NetFlix competition). Wish there was more of this to point students at...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, July 26th, 2009
Thought-provoking post by Adam Goucher on the psychological benefits of breaking big decisions up into smaller ones (which cites this paper). As he says, this may be why 36 two-week iterations is better than one 18-month release cycle...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
DemoCamp Toronto 21 is being held on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 from 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM in the Velma Roger Theatre at 333 Bloor St E. (Thanks to Mike Lee, Bonnie Schnurr, and everyone else at Rogers for the space.)
Jon Udell will be speaking about open government, calendar data, ...
Posted in DemoCamp | No Comments »