The Third Bit
Start where you are, use what you have, help who you can.
In Brief
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Co-founder of Software Carpentry
and The Architecture of Open Source Applications
ACM SIGSOFT Influential Educator of the Year
Co-winner, Jolt Award, Best General Book
Member, Python Software Foundation
Author or editor of over a dozen books on programming and two for children
Recent Writing
Recent Posts
2021-07-23: Software Design for Data Scientists
2021-07-22: Whatever Happened to TidyBlocks?
2021-07-22: I Hope They Would Have Liked It
2021-07-18: What Everyone in Tech Should Know About Teaching and Learning
2021-07-17: Software Engineering's Greatest Hits
2021-07-05: Beneath Coriandel
2021-06-30: That Seems Simple to Me
2021-06-25: A Proficiency Test for Research Software Engineers
2021-06-19: A Magic USB Drive
2021-05-17: Two Books
2021-04-20: Scorecards
2021-04-19: First Day with Metabase
2021-04-19: Evening and Morning Routine
2021-04-17: Building a Book (Part 3)
...or follow me on Twitter
Recent Papers
Smalls & Wilson (2021): Ten quick tips for staying safe online
Lin et al (2020): Ten quick tips for making things findable
Nederbragt et al (2020): Ten quick tips for teaching with participatory live coding
Denny et al (2019): Research this! Questions that computing educators most want computing education researchers to answer
Sholler et al (2019): Ten simple rules for helping newcomers become contributors to open projects
Wilson (2019): Ten quick tips for creating an effective lesson
Brown & Wilson (2019): Ten quick tips for teaching programming
Current and Recent Projects
Teaching Tech Together
A book about teaching programming for people with technical backgrounds but no formal training as educators.
JavaScript for Data Science
An introduction to JavaScript for both client-side and server-side programming for data scientists who have never used it before.
Research Software Engineering in Python
A textbook for a semester-long course on building research software and running research software projects. This book is due to be published mid-2021.
TidyBlocks
A blocks-based tool for teaching basic data science built in JavaScript using Google's Blockly toolkit.
Software Tools in JavaScript
Teaches software design by re-implementing common software engineering tools in Node.js; currently in beta.
Building Software Together
A student's guide to team software projects that covers everything from using Git to running meetings; currently in beta.
The Architecture of Open Source Applications
A collection of essays describing the architectures of fifty open source projects of various sizes, many written by those projects' creators.
The Carpentries
A non-profit organization dedicated to teaching basic software and data skills to researchers world-wide. I co-founded its predecessor, Software Carpentry, and was its first Executive Director.
In the wake of posts about Shopify's support for white nationalists and DataCamp's attempts to cover up sexual harassment
I have had to disable comments on this blog. Please email me if you'd like to get in touch.