• 1 min read

Grading for Growth

This article lays out many of the things that worry and bother me about the way we teach, assess and grade.

  • Web site excerpt: Research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond. Click to read Grading for Growth, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

  • Link to site: Grading for Growth

  • 1 min read

Software Needs To Be More Expensive

I agree with the high level argument. The open source situation does need a solution. But in general, we need to find ways to pay software developers more for the work they put into writing software. Wait! What do I mean? We have trained the world to expect to pay $0 for software that took huge numbers of person months to create. $4.90 is expensive! I know this is how the market weeds out useless products. But lots of useful ones need to fight this too. Try-before-you buy should remove the risk factor. But once you adopt an app and use it regularly then be willing to pay a serious amount for a serious app. People just don't have a sense of how much time and effort it takes to create even something as simple as an exellent solitaire game.

  • Web site excerpt: Software, like coffee, is too artificially cheap, and we need to make it more expensive. I have one suggestion for how to do that.

  • Link to site: Software Needs To Be More Expensive

  • 1 min read

Pydantic: Simplifying Data Validation in Python – Real Python

Excellent introduction and overview of one of the most used python packages: Pydantic.

  • Web site excerpt: Discover the power of Pydantic, Python's most popular data parsing, validation, and serialization library. In this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn how to make your code more robust, trustworthy, and easier to debug with Pydantic.

  • Link to site: Pydantic: Simplifying Data Validation in Python – Real Python

  • 1 min read

So your teacher wants you to do open source

Teachers, like me, might think it’s a good idea to suggest that students do a quick open source contribution. This article explains why that might be doing harm to the project’s.

  • Web site excerpt: If your teacher (or tutorial/video/hackathon/etc) says "go do X in an open source project" and then sends you off unsupervised, they haven't adequately prepa...

  • Link to site: So your teacher wants you to do open source

  • 1 min read

Kamal: hot deployment tool to watch—or a total game changer?—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

An excellent review and investigation of the new hotness in cloud deployment, Kamal. Alternative to K8S and k3s, supposedly much simpler.