Inspired by Michael Ogawa’s Code Swarm, an ex-student named David Scannell who did a lot of work on DrProject has created Totem Pole, a simple visualization of who’s been contributing to a project how recently. Neat!
Our new book, Practical Programming, is now available from Pragmatic (the publisher) and O’Reilly, as well as on Amazon.com — yay! Topics include:
A month ago, Mayor David Miller announced Toronto’s plan to open up its data to its citizens (and the rest of the world). Over on his blog, David Crow is now musing about ways to inspire the community to build applications, services, and business on top of that data. My plan is to run my consulting course in the fall term (September to December), and give the grad and undergrad students who take it credit for leveraging whatever information they can in some useful way. We’ll have a better idea in July or August of exactly what’s going to be available; hope you’ll all chime in with suggestions for things the students could do.
Via Mike Gunderloy, an announcement about RailsBridge:
The RailsBridge Mission: to create an inclusive and friendly Ruby on Rails community.
The RailsBridge Guidelines:
…the key message of RailsBridge is simple, and goes beyond any one project: the Rails community is the product of everyone who participates, and it can be a positive force for good in the world. We think there are enough Rails developers who feel this way that the somewhat negative image of Rails that is current in some parts of the web can be revised—not by claiming that we’re welcoming, but by actually acting that way.
Three cheers, and best of luck.
Dear Lazyweb,
Does anyone know of any undergraduate or graduate courses offered by Computer Science departments, for CS students, on how to teach CS? If so, I’d be grateful for pointers.
Over 600 volunteers and leaders in science and technology, representing award-winning Canadian institutions and organizations across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) open their doors, offering an engaging experience and look into the fascinating accomplishments of world-class research and activities. See http://www.sciencerendezvous.ca/ for details
In the wake of Obama’s announcement that his administration aims to spend 3% of GDP on scientific research, a lot of people have been asking how Canada will respond. The answer, at least for some Canadians, is to change the law to allow parents to pull their children out of classes in which evolution is discussed. *sigh*
Things I did this week that I was supposed to:
Things I didn’t do that I really needed to:
Things I hadn’t planned to do that were worth doing:
Things that I did that I really shouldn’t have wasted time on:
Here’s hoping next week will be more productive…
Over on the Basie blog, Zuzel Vera Pacheco writes:
This week I presented cdocs at the Scientific Student Day as part of the thesis’ requirements. It won two awards: Best Work and Best Written Work. Also I got the membership to the Cuban Society of Mathematics and Computer Science and a spanish edition of Introduction to Programming Using Java as prizes. I owe you the English translation of the paper and the presentation.
Congratulations, Zuzel—it’s well deserved.
Take a couple of minutes and read these two recent posts by David Crow:
Both are about creating or nurturing a vibrant tech startup community in Toronto, which I think is important for the city as a whole, and vital to the long-term health of the university as government funding becomes less dependable. But did you notice what’s not there? I’m the only faculty member named in the first, and while the second lists MaRS, the Ontario Science Centre, and OCAD, it doesn’t mention the University of Toronto. Can you imagine someone in Silicon Valley not mentioning Stanford or Berkeley when describing who’s involved in the local tech scene? I wish I knew how to fix this (how to get more university faculty involved in the local tech scene, not how to edit David’s posts to include them), but nothing I’ve tried so far has worked. I’m open to suggestions…
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