Education – Software and Other Shenanigans

More building with Hotwire

Education, Kotlin, Programming, Projects No Responses »

Jun 302022

I’ve been sitting down and spending some more time with the Hotwire framework after building an initial proof-of-concept and moving towards a simple 0.1 version of something. I still really like the framework, mostly because it simplifies a lot of development, without feeling like I’m sacrificing anything. Not only am I not doing as much work in the front-end, but the advantage of server-side rendering means there’s little to no state to manage in the front-end, which seems to be a huge part of front-end development. Moving from the “standard” way of writing a static webpage and populating it based on JSON data to rendering the page on the server-side is a change in how back-end development gets approached, but really it’s not as much as you may think. I stand by my comments in my original post – Hotwire is my first choice for a front-end framework.

Of Newspacks and Substacks

Education, General Commentary, Shenanigans No Responses »

Aug 312021

A couple of years ago, Automattic (makers of WordPress, which powers this blog), Google, and some news-related organizations announced Newspack, a publishing platform that was supposed to be “WordPress for news organizations” (per their site). The original announcement, like all new product announcements, sounded very promising – a publishing platform that had best practices built right in, a curated list of plugins designed to support news organizations, all built on top of the platform that most of the web already runs on. So how did Newspack seem to peter out, especially when other publishing platforms, like Substack, take off?

Let’s think about what online learning can be like at the grade school level

Education, General Commentary No Responses »

Dec 312020

So how’s the whole remote learning thing working out for everybody? That’s a rhetorical question, people have no problem talking about how much they hate the whole setup. I get that parents want their kids to go back to school (or at least give them some peace and quiet while they’re trying to work from home), but not only have we been at this for a while, a lot of us are likely to still be at this, likely for the rest of the school year. It’s really frustrating, but now that we’ve moved from the “This is good enough to finish the semester and then next fall we’ll be back to normal” of spring 2020, to “Well, we actually did this for a whole year” (calendar year at least), it’s time to start having a little bit of a retrospective on virtual education, what does work, what doesn’t, how how it needs to change to be useful in the future.

Keeping your sanity while working from home with the rest of the family

Education, General Commentary, Work No Responses »

Aug 242020

I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff about how to best work from home (because apparently that’s not going to stop any time soon) floating around, either from people I know offline or being posted on social media. Given that most people were going into work every day, I’m guessing a lotheirt of employers were scrambling to define what they expected about working from home. Judging by some of the dictates I’ve seen come out, these employers they only really know how to operate off the “butts in seats” school of management. So, when faced with this brave new world of employees not being on-site anymore, they appear to have turned to how-to guides that were already out there online, which means they were pre-pandemic, when people working from home were generally there by themselves. Now that we’re all doing it, that’s a dumb assumption, but I haven’t seen anything that acknowledges the realities of trying to put in a productive workday with the whole family at home, so let’s revisit the whole “how to work from home” thing, shall we?

A more useful guide to getters and setters

Education, Java, Programming 1 Response »

Nov 232012

While perusing the Internet, I stumbled on some question about getters and setters and why people are supposed to use them (which of course I can’t find the link to now, even with the help of the mighty Google). After reading the question, I realized something. Holy crap, a lot of getter/setter examples on the Internet aren’t that good. Most of the tutorials on getters and setters talk about variable visibility, and you don’t get any real useful discussion about how to use them properly outside of technical forums or discussion boards. So, I thought I’d write a quick little guide on the topic in part to increase the number of useful pages on the topic out there on the Internet, and thus make it easier to find a good reference on the matter. Continue reading »

When I Get Filthy Rich: Open Source Software Foundation

Education 6 Responses »

Aug 132012

Like everyone else who’s ever wanted money at any point in their lives (i.e. like everyone else on the planet), I’ve put a little thought into just what I’d do if I ever go so obscenely rich I could stop worrying about money. Now, since definitions are important, I’ll define obscenely rich as making so much money a year, your immediate reaction is to utter an obscenity.

One of the things on that list is starting an open source foundation at my old college. This would be a setup designed to have students create or maintain open source projects that are released to the real world. The idea here is to give students an easily-accessible option that gives them all kinds of crazy useful real world experience other than “get a real-world full-time programming job.” Part of this was inspired by ~~Steven Hicks~~ Steven Hicks’ [ed. Fixed my grammar] post on Computer Science classes he’d like to take.

Random mongo tips learned the hard way

Education, Programming No Responses »

Jul 262012

I did a little bit of work using mongo recently, and I stumbled across some of those “lessons learned the hard way” things that I thought I’d share. If you haven’t used mongo or aren’t familiar with it, I recommend their official site and Wikipedia for a quick introduction on what mongo is and how it works.

It’s not just about learning to program

Education 1 Response »

Jun 162012

Around the end of 2011 and 2012, CodeAcademy.com starting promoting and subsequently launched Code Year, offering up a programming lesson every Monday for people to learn to code. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m doing the Code Year lessons myself, since I haven’t had a lot of web development experience in the past, and for the kicks.