Data is ones and zeroes | Software is ones and zeroes and hard work.
From Mark Guzdial’s ever-informative blog:
I just got a report…on the state of the Python CS1 market. The market size is estimated to be about 20,300 students per year, up 45% since last year. The market has had around 40% gains for each of the last three years.
Yay! But I wonder what they count as “the market”, and how big the absolute share (as opposed to growth) is… Anyone know?
UCOSP is “Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects”, a program whereby undergrad (and grad) students from universities all across Canada can work together in distributed teams on software development projects for course credit. It’s running again this fall with backing from O’Reilly, Google, and the Canadian Association of Computer Science, and back in July, Andrew Louis (one of the organizers) went to OSCON, the major annual Open Source Conference. His blog post describes what he learned there about efforts elsewhere to get more open source into CS education; there are lots of good pointers, and plenty to think about.
One of my few regrets about leaving academia is that I won’t be working as closely with students on things like this as I used to—it was always tremendously rewarding. If you’d like to be involved as a student, a project mentor, or an academic sponsor, please head over to the UCOSP site and get in touch. I promise you’ll be glad you did.
The latest issue of PragPub has Adam Goucher’s article on page objects in Python—check it out!
David Scannell, an ex-student of mine who is now at GridCentric, has posted an interesting article on using elastic clouds for continuous integration. Lots of ideas here I only vaguely knew — worth checking out.
Jeff Balogh, a former GSoC student of mine now with Mozilla, will be speaking at DjangoCon about “Switching addons.mozilla.org from CakePHP to Django“. Please go and heckle on my behalf 
Sara Kjellberg has an interesting (scholarly) article on how researchers use blogs: nothing shocking, but I was intrigued by the cross-discipline commonalities.
Twitter addicts looking for interesting people to follow should check out this page, which describes 15 well-known female techies who tweet. I’d be very interested in a similar list of people with physical disabilities and/or visual impairments if anyone knows of one.
I’m a big fan of Jon Udell’s work; here are two recent examples to convince you that you should be too:
Apologies if there was any trouble reaching this site yesterday—I’ve switched hosting from Site5 to Dreamhost. Everything should be back to normal now; if you spot any problems, please let me know.
While I’m no longer employed by the University of Toronto, I’m still involved with several student projects. Several of them have had good news to report this past week:
It’s been a productive summer: lots of juggling to do in the next few weeks as everything comes down to the wire at once, but I’m really pleased with how everyone’s project has worked out.