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2024

  • 1 min read

Grading for Growth

Link: Grading for Growth: "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."

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

  • 1 min read

Software Needs To Be More Expensive

Link: Software Needs To Be More Expensive: "Software, like coffee, is too artificially cheap, and we need to make it more expensive. I have one suggestion for how to do that."

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.

  • 1 min read

So your teacher wants you to do open source

Link: So your teacher wants you to do open source: "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..."

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.

  • 1 min read

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

Link: Kamal: hot deployment tool to watch—or a total game changer?—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog: "The SRE pros at Evil Martians attempt an objective analysis of the promises, applications, and potential of Kamal (formerly known as MRSK), plus things to watch out for."

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