I haven't been teaching this past semester. That's why I haven't been writing much about lessons. I miss working with students but that will resume in the fall and this semester has allowed me to get a jump on new projects. It's also allowed me to look at some student issues from a bit of a distance. One issue that keeps coming up is cheating. Some of it, classroom cheating.

Quick post to add to the recent command line fu I've been writing about. Douglas Peterson had another Whatever happened to post. This time on Logo. I wanted to reply, talk about NetLogo and link to some of my old NetLogo posts to help show how cool it is. Nikola supports tags, makes a nice tags page and for each tag, a nice page of all the links. Nikola has a plugin tags which lets you manage tags from the command line.

Over in the Facebook AP Computer Science Teachers group someone asked for thoughts on covering BASH scripting as a post AP topic. A number of us made suggestions. I linked to this old blog post. One group member said she asked around for similar suggestions and the response she got was "vi and awk." I wanted to jokingly respond "and after they suggested that they got into their time machine and went back to the 70's.

Repost This is a repost from March 2015. It didn't transfer when I rebooted the blog. Original Quick post on why I love the Unix command line. We're busy organizing CSTUY's first hackathon. It's going to be at SumAll, where we hold our weekly hacking sessions but while taking registration, we had a little program. The kids signed up on a Google doc but we all know the story – when people sign up for a free event, even one with free food and t-shirts, many don't show.

Yesterday, Doug Peterson wrote a "Whatever happened to" post subtitled HTML as an essential 21st Century skill? It's a nice post. I left a comment but thought I'd elaborate here. No, knowing HTML is not programming - it's markup. Even so, when I help people design CS programs, I'll frequently recommend starting with HTML or at least introducing it early. Why? It's a gateway and not just to programming.

I'm moving to a new blogging platform. I'm still going to use GitHub pages but after a few years of using Jekyll, I'm switching to Nikola. I think I've got the move worked out but if you're reading this via an rss or atom reader, make sure to check back in a couple of days - you might have to re-subscribe. Why am I switching? Because I hate Ruby.

This weekend, I had a conversation on Twitter with my friend Roy Bahat: @zamansky Mike, unrelated, what do you think of https://t.co/BT1ublbajF ? — Roy Bahat (@roybahat) April 9, 2016 @roybahatMaybe I'll blog about my thoughts about online environments vs local installs — Mike Zamansky (@zamansky) April 9, 2016 @roybahat Agree with this but there are many issues. I'll try to write more later. Now going to see my son in @umgass prod of Pinafore.

SoftDev students are hard at work on their final projects. By now, they all have fairly complex code bases. This limits how much I can help them with debugging. There are some problems, though, that they have to contend with that even with experience, are hard to spot. Notably because the very tools you use to debug these errors are part of the problem. Last week, this happened twice.

A good workman is known by his tools, or so the saying goes. My tools of choice are my terminal shell and Emacs. I suppose if I was a full time developer working with a limited set of tools I might like an IDE like JetBrains or Eclipse but no matter how many alternatives I try, I always end back in Emacs. I recommend that my students spend time not only in Emacs but also in tools like Vim or Sublime Text.

Quick post on why I love the Unix command line. We're busy organizing CSTUY's first hackathon. It's going to be at SumAll, where we hold our weekly hacking sessions but while taking registration, we had a little program. The kids signed up on a Google doc but we all know the story – when people sign up for a free event, even one with free food and t-shirts, many don't show.