Alfred Thompson wrote about CS education tools earlier today. I've also been meaning to write on the topic but from a different point of view. I do my best to keep up with the latest and greatest in the CS world both on the academic side as well as the professional one. That's not really possible, but I do my best. When I have a small project to work on I'll some times use it as an excuse to play with some recent technology.

A few weeks ago I wrote about introducing testing in CS classes, specifically using a testing framework. In that post I talked about the plan but now I can talk about the results. My class interleaves with Hunter's CSCI 13500 - Software Analysis and Design I class. One day each week, my students have complete a hands on lab focusing on whatever is being covered in the 13500 class. I decided to use one of those labs as a first foray into testing.

The other day I discovered auto-yasnippet, another great package by Oleh Krehel or abo-abo. It looks like it's going to be a great way to solve a particular problem that come up now and again. There are plenty of times when I want to create a number of similar but slightly different blocks of text. The example on the project site is: You could use multiple cursors, a macro, or other methods to put in the common text but you still have to deal with the parts of each line that are unique, the red, green, and blue.

This is a good time to be an Emacs user. In addition to all of the great packages and tools being developed there seem to be more people regularly blogging and making videos about Emacs than ever before. Planet Emacsen aggregates a ton of Emcas blogs and Emacs Legend Sacha Chua posts what's going on in emacs every week on her blog. on the video front, uncle dave has recently joined the ranks of emacs video producers.

One of my titles at Hunter College is Director of the Daedalus CS Honors program. It's something like a Hunter specific, CS specific version of the CUNY Macaulay Honors program. Hunter gives all its students the ability to get a great computer science education at a fraction of the cost of a private institution and if you're a Daedalus scholar you also get a scholarship, a laptop, special classes (with me :-) ), activities and more.

With CS4All being the buzzword of the day we're paying a lot of attention to the fact that when we teach a CS class for all students, most of them won't end up studying CS or going directly into a tech heavy field. Among those that do study CS though, there is another division. Those studying CS as an academic exercise or to go on to graduate studies and those who are going in to the tech sector.

Thanks to everyone who voted for topics or commented with suggestions for videos. I'll try to get to them in the coming months. Today is just a quick hit on Atomic Chrome - an Emacs package and browser extension that allows you to edit web form inputs with Emacs. UPDATE I forgot to mention that you can set a shortcut key, at least in chrome rather than clicking on the icon.

I generally use three email accounts. My personal one, work one, and one for my non-profit. For a couple of years, I've been using mu4e under Emacs for both my work and non-profit email accounts and gmail for my personal account. I've had lots of requests for a video on what I do but I've been hesitant for two reasons: There are parts of my configuration that are copied from others and I really don't understand.

I've been having fun with this years Advent of Code competition. So far, I've been able to keep up but with I expect that to change in another couple of days since I'll be traveling for the weekend. After solving a problem, I like looking over some of the other solutions on the Advent of Code subreddit. Even with similar agorithmic solutions there's a decent amount of variation in the actual code and solutions in different languages can look radically different.

The 38th installment of Using Emacs is about dired, Emacs' built in mode for navigating and working with directories. I'm not a dired power user and in fact am just now making a real effort to explore it and work it into my daily workflow and with that in mind, I'd love to hear some configuration and use suggestions from people who use it regularly. Here's the configuration I use: