Relating to the linkedin post that spawned my last blog post a friend noted: … why should it be the burden on companies trying to hire folks with those skillsets to also teach those skillsets? Isn’t that what educational institutions are supposed to do (git, etc.)? Even though companies, if they actually cared about equity and diversity would be better served to take on this burden, the reality is that they haven't and it's either left for students on their own, or as I commented on in my post colleges.

People say that one of the impossible problems for CS teachers is keeping current - they say the field is constantly changing, how can a teacher keep up with all the new things going on. Well, on the one hand it isn't true - most of the core of CS is the same. We still teach roughly the same programming constructs, data structures and algorithms. On the other hand, it is true.

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.

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 recently stumbled upon Laurie Barth on Twitter and noticed a couple of tweets about tech interviews and the hiring process, something I've been thinking about recently. Solid rant. I think the teach to the programming test market already exists. And it’s why interviewers who subscribe to these tactics get upset if a candidate admits they’ve seen the problem previously. Because it ruins the illusion that this is revealing how candidates think.

I was planning on either following up on how I use GitHub classroom or commenting on the recent NY Times opinion piece on the College Board but the follow up, fall out, and polarization from the Amazon NY thing has been stuck in my head so I thought I'd write a bit more about it. Like my previous post, this isn't really about Amazon but rather about the long game, equity, and diversity and how a lot of people are fooling themselves.

That was the big tech news today. I know there was a good deal of vocal outrage about the deal but to be honest I was pretty surprised by the news. Normally deals like these get steamrolled through for better or worse. I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I have no problem with Amazon - I've got a bunch of former students working there. Mostly in Seattle but at least one in NYC.

Every morning one of the first things I do is quickly glance at my emails and other notifications. I really should wait until I'm more awake but old habits die hard. As some of you know over the past couple of years I've been making a series of videos and related post on using my editor of choice, Emacs. I've done 48 videos, have over 2500 subscribers on YouTube and people seem to find some value from the series.

If I look at my leaving Stuyvesant and the NYC Department of Education to join Hunter College as the end of Act I of my teaching career, then our family's West Coast swing was a nice way to pull down the curtain. The impetus for the trip was visiting Batya - she's interning at Facebook this summer and having an absolute blast. The plan was to spend a few days in San Francisco, then a little south to Mountain View, where Batya was staying, and then fly up to Seattle for a couple of days.

Yesterday I read over Hillary's briefing on her initiative on Technology and Innovation. A lot of it sounds good but, at least for the education piece, I have my doubts. My feeling is that she's pretty much aligned with the current administration education wise and the current administration has been as bad if not worse than the previous with respect to public education. While I have issues with some of the education pieces and very much like some of the others, I don't want to get into that today.