Tomorrow morning I fly out to Seattle for SIGCSE 2017. For those of you not in the CS Education space, SIGCSE is the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) special interest group for computer science education.

I've wanted to go for years but have never been able. It's hard for a high school teacher to miss a week in mid March, particularly in places with a school calendar similar to New York. NY city schools are already closed for a week in February and then Spring Break is right around the corner. If you're teaching an AP course with the exam in early May, losing a week in March is really not an option. Even if you can take the time, you'll probably have to foot the bill out of pocket.

Now that I'm at Hunter, I've got more flexibility in terms of schedule and attending is probably even more important given my current roles.

I'm looking forward to the talks and events but probably even more looking forward to seeing old friends, meeting new ones and seeing face to face friends that til now I've only known through the web.

On Saturday I'll be part of a panel (thanks Ria) titled "Tools we can't live without." I'll probably talk about the way I use git and GitHub and how I get my students up to speed but there are lots of tools I can talk about.

I plan to write up a series of posts on how I use GitHub (and how it evolved from other versioning systems) as well as thoughts about other tools I've used and some I've struggled with.

If you're going to be at SIGCSE drop me a line, I'd love to connect.