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.

<figure class="z_image_right"><img src="/img/monitors.jpg" width="250px"/> </figure> Got a new monitor today and wanted to share. My old one was a 27" Hanns G. Actually, the old ones - my old set up was 2 of them side by side. When I started at Hunter, I was given a piddly small monitor so I tried to buy my own 27" Hanns G to bring in but they were no longer available. The 27" jobs available then were much more expensive so my work monitor situation has been sadly lacking.

Two weekends ago I took a group of my first year students up to Catskills Conf, an annual event that I describe as "light tech conference with a focus on diversity and inclusion meets summer camp." I've written about the event before if anyone's interested in more details. As in past years, Devorah ran her knitting for good project. In each of the first two years of the project, attendees of Catskills Conf learned how to know and collectively knit, crocheted and assembled a blanket for Project Linux which provides hand made blankets to children in crisis.