Comes Round Again

Another year over; what have I learned?

• I successfully avoided management for two decades, but my luck finally ran out: I was promoted to engineering manager at Deep Genomics. The company had some layoffs this autumn, which is always difficult, but I got to run one-day workshops on evidence-based teaching for about forty of my colleagues and spend a couple of hundred hours teaching them R and Python, which has forced me to re-think what I teach.

• The lightning talks that Mike Hoye, Brittany Johnson, and I organized for It Will Never Work in Theory went very well.

• Software Design by Example was published. I’m working on the Python version right now, but suspect it will be my last technical book: people aren’t reading them, and there are stories I want to write.

• I published “Twelve quick tips for software design”.

• We spent a long weekend in Montréal, which was our first family trip since the start of lockdown. I’d forgotten how beautiful the city can be in the spring…

• We went to BC in July to have a much-delayed service for my mum, but came down with COVID on the second day and had to cancel almost everything.

• I said goodbye to some friends this year, including one who shaped who I am today more than anyone else outside my family.

• Goodbye Twitter; hello Mastodon.

• Favorite book: either Honeycomb by Joanne Harris or The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix.

• Favorite movie: Everything Everywhere All at Once. We watched it in a Vancouver hotel room one night while we were sick and it was exactly what we needed.

• Favorite album: didn’t find anything new this year that particularly excited me.

• Favorite moments: sharing dad jokes with my wife and daughter whether they wanted me to or not.

Selected Posts

• The Wes Montgomery of Software
• Mitigation (or, how to think about roles in a company)
• How to Write a Technical Book (part 1, part 2)
• The Sisyphus Test
• Thoughts on the Hippocratic License
• Listening Means Changing Your Mind (or, why I didn’t launch a pledge for more accessible conferences)
• A Combinatoric Geometry Problem that has bothered me for over 20 years
• The Compassionate Programmer
• Grumbles about teaching:
• A Cacaphony of Explanations
• The best way to evaluate a programming language for beginners
• I Don’t Know What to Teach
• The Notebook Not Taken
• Debuggable Explanations
• What I Want for Code in Textbooks
• I Want a Memory Diagram Generator
• Teaching in the Third Dimension
• Sessioncasting