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!!!! That's big news. Some day I'll go into the frustrations and ridiculousness that caused a year plus delay but now that's all in the past and we're good to go. We've got a Masters program for aspiring teachers and a certificate program for teachers who are already licensed in another subject area.

The plan is to run a summer intensive in July and have our first cohort through the program by the end of 2020. We have a real opportunity here to get ahead of things and build a group of certified master CS teachers in and for NYC. This can be relly big and is very exciting.

The other big thing for me has to do with the other big initiative I started at Hunter - the Daedalus CS Scholars program. The program has been growing each year both in terms of students and in terms of programs and student opportunities. The exciting thing for me is that we're about to have our first graduates. The Daedalus program didn't exist four years ago and now it's a big part of Hunter CS and soon it will be sending graduates out into the world. I'm super happy and proud of what the students have done and continue to do.

Both of these really excite me. When I started, I figured it would be about five years to get things running smoothly so to have both in existence in 4 is super cool.

Other things I'm looking forward to? I'll be giving a talk at SIGCSE2020 in a couple of months on how to take your students from GitHub neophytes to pull request masters and then a full workshop version at CSTA2020. I'm stoked about going to both conferences and also to help Devorah once again run her Blanket Statement project at CSTA. If I can get the funding there are also a couple of other conferences I'd love to attend.

I also looked over the list of speakers for CSTA2020 (harder to navigate for SIGCSE) and am really excited to see many friends present. Also noticed Mark Emry will be presenting and really hope to see Mark in person after something like over a dozen years.

On the personal side of things, Batya moved into her own apartment just before the new year and Devorah's setting up Batya's room as a fiber studio so we'll have some adjustments on the home front but all good and all exciting.

I'm sure there are other exciting things to come in 2020 but that's enough for now.