== true
When I was a junior in college, I lost a point on an exam because I had code like this: if (isTall == true) { … } Dr. Wallingford showed me with his red pen that == true is completely unnecessary. This is quite clear when you consider the truth table: isTall isTall == true […]
Random Splats
I keep a thinklist of things I’d like to think about. This list comes in handy during meetings. Sometimes I even look forward to meetings, because that means I’ll have some time to think. Recently I added to this list the notion of generating random splats. My first thinking was to generate a circular polyline […]
FabLearn 2017
I spent the weekend at the FabLearn 2017 conference. The conference brings together teachers, policy makers, museum staff, and nearly anyone who cares about learning by making. My favorite conferences are the ones that I write about. So I figure I should write about this one—so that I can add it to my list of […]
Pixel Cat
To improve listening in my overly large family, we have introduced a feature into our evening meals. Each night, someone issues a challenge, a question, or some other activity that gives each member of the family an opportunity to share and be listened to. Last night, my oldest son gave us the task of creating […]
The Before Loop
My students last week invented the “before” loop. We won’t talk about loops in class for a while yet, but they waste no time in accidentally spawning them in unexpected ways. See their latest cleverness:
Eclipse Shortcuts
Eclipse has a lot of keyboard shortcuts and I know hardly any of them. But my students still think I’m an ace. These are the ones I do use on a regular basis, shared so that my students can be aces: Automatically add import statements to classes that live in faraway packages with Control-Shift-O or […]
Formatting Java in Eclipse
The style that the Eclipse auto-formatter imposes on my Java code is 99% excellent. However, whenever I set up a new workspace, that 1% of style I disagree with eats away at my soul. I document the few things that I do change here because it’s easier to set them anew then try to migrate […]
Checking Slack Participation with Ruby and OAuth2
A couple of years ago, a student asked me if I thought MOOCs were going to make universities obsolete. I said no, because in my experience of taking MOOCs, one thing that didn’t scale was the number of people answering questions in the forums. No matter the class size, there seemed to be about 5-10 […]
Fitting by Rotating
Last spring I was talking about media queries with some students, and we joked around about just rotating any structures that were too wide to fit in the viewport. As silly as this idea is, I wondered how easy it would be to do with just CSS. First, here’s a div with some text that […]
Toward Blocks-Text Parity
I gave a talk on a paper that a student and I wrote at COMPSAC 2017 in Torino, Italy. Our work was a position paper responding to the folks who say that blocks programming languages are going to take over the world. These people do exist. The following is a rough manuscript of my talk. […]