How the Year Went
I wrote a post on New Year's Day about things I probably wouldn't do this year. Here's my score card: Turn Software Carpentry into a book: nope, didn't get to it (though we didpublish our lessons)....
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Just Keep Swimming
I had a conversation a few days ago with a young colleague who said (basically), "Nothing I do ever seems to take off the way your projects do." Coincidentally, Dan Luu's What's Worked in Computer...
View ArticleMy Literature Problems
Problem #1 A couple of years ago, I put together a bibliography of research into the software engineering aspects of scientific computing. I'd now like to find all papers published in the last five...
View ArticleTeaching in Cambridge
I ran a three-hour class on teaching as part of EuroSciPy in Cambridge this summer; the video is available online.
View ArticleBooks Away
Earlier this week my mother gave away the last of my father's books: 67 boxes containing 1,969 volumes, or about half of what he owned when he died. I hope they find a good home...
View ArticleA Modest Proposal
I had the pleasure of meeting Denia Djokic on Tuesday evening, and during the conversation we came up with a modest proposal: put 10% of the national budget for scientific research in a special fund,...
View ArticleIn My Better World
In my better world, programming language designers have been studying usability since the 1960s, and every new language worries as much about usability as it does about memory management or...
View ArticleContinuous Installation Checking
This one started with me trying and failing to install some bioinformatics software on my Mac, then turned into a Twitter rant: Everyone: please start doing installation-driven development. Not...
View ArticleRegisters
Linguists recognize that speech occurs in different modes or registers, which serve different purposes: Intimate: used with very close friends, family members, and romantic partners, it relies on a...
View ArticleThrottling
Every technology that solves problems creates new ones, most of which can't be solved by purely technological means. Online discussions (including Twitter, mailing lists, and comment threads on blogs)...
View ArticleZen and the Art of Assignment Operators
I was 19 when I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For months afterward, I just had to tell everyone I knew about Quality-with-a-capital-Q and all the other big ideas I had just...
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Trying to Find a Form
I have been thinking (again) about what to teach in a full-length course on Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry, which has led me, meta begetting meta, to thinking about how to represent the...
View ArticleFor Some Value of 'Just'
One of the cardinal rules of Software Carpentry is never say 'just', because it signals the listener that the speaker thinks their problem is trivial. I've been reminded of this recently when hearing...
View ArticleWhy Teachers Don't Collaborate on Lesson Development
Later: Christina Koch wrote a rejoinder to this article that says a lot of insightful things better than I ever have. For the last three years, I've been asking people why teachers don't collaborate...
View ArticleAccident or Malice
I'm involved in several hybrid online and in-person communities, and two of them have had unpleasant incidents in the last couple of weeks. In one, a poorly-phrased but probably sincere question...
View ArticleGet Better But Not Change
The tragedy of the Hapsburgs was that they wanted things to get better, but couldn't bear the thought that anything might actually change. — Frederic Morton George Orwell said something similar in his...
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Exaptation and the Future of Software Engineering
Back in the 1980s, we knew that software engineering was going to become mathematically rigorous like electrical and civil engineering. Where they used calculus to figure out an antenna's gain and...
View ArticleDoes the Stage Create the Actor?
A lot of coding workshops have sprung up in the last ten years, ranging from one-day events to teach people the basics of HTML to months-long internships designed to turn participants into...
View ArticleWhy I Teach (Revisited)
When I first started volunteering at the University of Toronto, students occasionally asked me why. This was my answer: When I was your age, I thought universities existed to teach people how to...
View ArticleMaybe I Actually Am An Engineer
The following exchange (lightly edited) took place on Twitter a few days ago: Titus Brown: bash is disastrous for pipelines! very hard to rerun entire analysis from bash script.Titus Brown: I want/we...
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