I was talking to a friend yesterday who had just started doing grad work in school leadership. It got me thinking about my original career plans and how you never know where you're going to end up. Well, not my original original career plans. When I started on Wall Street I had no idea what the future would bring. For all I knew, I could have been a career professional programmer or even gone over to the business side.

Happy new year to everyone. I've been reading some prediction posts this morning on blogs and social media. Big national and world level stuff. I've never been much for predictions so I thought I'd share some more local and personal things I'm looking forward to in the coming year. First a couple of big ones. I'm just about to complete my fourth year at Hunter. Time really does fly. It's been a long road but late in 2019 NY State finally approved our CS Teacher Certification programs!

Or, as Wayne Gretzky said "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Why do I mention this? Because I've been hearing way too often from young people who are too quick to deny themselves opportunities and too often these are from students who have come from less advantaged backgrounds. It's Fall and I've been making my rounds visiting local schools to talk to seniors about colleges in general and Hunter CS in particular.

No, this post is not about the Waterfall development model. Devorah and I had a chance to take a little vacation up north. First stop, Niagara Falls. <br clear="all"> We did the Canada side 9 years ago when we did our Erie Canal bike trip (you can read about that by checking out some of my early blog posts). This time, the American side. My take is that the Canadian side is more polished and all private attractions - think Times Square or Disney.

Two days ago, a teacher's comment on a frustrating situation made me mad. Yesterday, I got to be part of something that made me very happy. Last night, Devorah and I ventured out to Coney Island to celebrate the twentieth wedding anniversary of two former students. It's such a joy and an honor to be included in these types of life events and even more so to count the couple and so many other former students and friends.

I spent today at Codeland, a one day conference in NYC designed for developers in the early stages of their careers. Just as at CSTA, I was there with the GitHub contingent. Codeland had talks and a keynote in a common auditorium, smaller breakout workshops and a couple of small vendor areas. I spent most of the morning upstairs in the GitHub lounge so I onl caught part of one morning talk.

There were a bunch of threads on the 10X Developer recently. You know - that mythical beast that's 10 times more productive than the regular software engineer. I didn't see any of the original threads but I'm guessing they started with "your startup needs them" and then moved to the "they can't work with anyone" along with tons of fun tongue and cheek 1X engineer tweets. It got me thinking about 10X students.

Many of us know Ria Galanos. Ria - a longtime friend and longtime CS teacher who has been very active in the APCS community has started a new chapter as a software engineer at Yext. Ria's also started blogging about it. I don't know the direction the blog will take but I'm sure it will be influenced by Ria's years as an educator. I'm also sure it will be worth reading.

I'm a big fan of E Ink e-readers. I had one a number of years ago. An Aztak EZ Reader. It was great. Small, cheap, and independent - that is, not tied in to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles and I found myself doing a lot more recreational reading with it. I still preferred paper for technical books but for easy reading there was nothing like having tons of reading options always available.

I'm glad it's Saturday morning. It's been a busy week. It looks like there's a couple more to plough through but hopefully then I can catch my breath over spring break. Why so busy? It's the same old story - you've got all those projects that you're waiting on and everything comes in at the same time. To start off, it's college decision season. The high school seniors all know their options and are deciding where to go.