A while ago I wrote about a small side project - GitHub Org Explorer - a small tool to make it easier to manager GitHub repositories based on organization. I'm using it as a replacement for the GitHub provided Classroom Assistant. I find it more flexible in terms of exporting assignments to my own machine and it allows me to delete repos en masse which is critical after the semester is over.

Episode 2 of the CS Ed podcast had Dan Garcia talk about exam creation. This wasn't a podcast about the value of exams - in class, high stakes or otherwise. In fact Dan says in the podcast it would be great to "get grades out of the equation. Grades are gonna be an impediment to learning." But recognizes that we have not say in this most of the time (and I'll add that though I agree grades can and do perform a function) so we should be creative in terms of assessment.

I thought it was time to give eshell in Emacs another try. It has some pretty cool features but for whatever reason, I've never really been able to adopt Emacs as my go to shell. Eshell out of the box is pretty cool but could use some enhancements. When launching at login it doesn't know about the path you set in your .bashrc or .zshrc in my case files. It just seemed to have problems with paths in general but that was fixed with the exce-path-from-shell package.

I saw a couple of posts the other day about the CS Ed Podcast. Kristin Stephens-Martinez of Duke interviewed (or will interview) six CS educators on a variety of topics. There are four posted so far: David Malan Dan Garcia Amy Ko Mark Guzdial Before I started I thought I'd listen to a few and then share some thoughts but I found so much to unpack in the second episode where Dan talks about testing that I decided to share my thoughts on the first episode, then Dan's and then see if find anything to comment on in episodes three and beyond.

The other day I stumbled upon Emacs's Live Coding plugin. It takes interactive coding up to the next level. Normally, when you code Python, if you're working in a REPL, every time you hit <Enter> the line you just typed is evaluated. When you're working ina source file, you're just editing until you send the file into a Python interpreter. With this module, your file is continually evaluated as you type and it shows you the results in a side window.

I've been using the gmail web interface for a long time. My first email or at least the oldest one still in the system dates back to Oct 18, 2004 7:29am. It was a letter to a buddy about an indoor turkey fryer and if he needed a lift to Fairway the following morning to shop. Before that, I used my Panix shell account - probably with PINE. Work email was using my own servers at Stuy along with either PINE or Emacs using VM mode which has long been deprecated.

I've been playing with ClojureScipt for my web projects recently and really like it. Much more fun than any of the JavaScript frameworks I've used. Still, getting started was somewhat difficult due to the number of options in tooling and uneven documentation and learning resources. Here's a video that shows how I use Emacs for ClojureScript development but the focus of the video is on how to get started with ClojureScript and Emacs takes a back seat other than an example of my workflow.

I'm a big fan of GitHub Classroom and use it for all of my class assignments. It's great for organizing, distributing, and collecting assignments and gets the kids used to using real world tools at the same time. I've written a bunch of posts on how I use it: How I use GitHub Classroom Communicating with Students - meybe GitHub to the rescue GitHub as a tool for education (part of a 4 part series) As well as a couple of others.

Ever since I started looking at Magit as a "git dashboard" instead of as a "git interface" it's been yet another Emacs killer app to me. I just recently started playing with forge which allows Magit to interface and interact with git "forges" like GitHub. This allows you to work on issues and pull requests without ever leaving Emacs. Here's a video on how easy it is. The video doesn't show this but the first time you fire forge up it will prompt you for credentials.

By living in Emacs I get a consistent interface across all sorts of tasks - programming, lesson planning, making presentations, preparing documents, and yes, even email. I've been using mu4e as my Emacs email client for a while now. Currently, I'm using Emacs for my work email and Gmail for personal. I've been thinking of going whole hog to mu4e and possibly migrating from Gmail to a new email provider for the personal stuff but there are still a few pain points with Emacs email: