All my blog posts and articles
Page 1 of 142 (2824 total posts)
I came across this fascinating piece by Adrian Colyer — Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations — and it genuinely reframed how I think about both technical systems and leadership. The core...
Read more →I came across a fascinating research paper that puts LLMs head-to-head with human participants in a classic creativity task, and the results are worth sitting with for a moment. [Ideas are Dimes a Dozen: Large Language Models for Idea Generation in Innovation](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm...
Read more →I stumbled across this post by Hamel Husain on Dokku and immediately wanted to spin up a server to try it. The pitch is simple but compelling: it's essentially Heroku, except you own the infrastructure. ...
Read more →I came across this fascinating paper documenting seven years of experience building and refining an undergraduate robotics course within a Computer Science curriculum, and it's packed with hard-won practical wisdom. Starting back in 20...
Read more →I stumbled across NiceGUI recently and it looks like a genuinely elegant solution for anyone who wants to build web-based user interfaces without leaving Python. The library lets you spin up buttons, dialogs, plots, 3D scenes, and more, all rendered directly ...
Read more →I recently rediscovered Midnight Commander and it instantly brought back memories of navigating filesystems before GUIs ruled everything — but honestly, it holds up remarkably well even today. mc is a dual-pane, text-mode file manager that runs beautifully in a t...
I recently stumbled across CodeCombat, and honestly it's one of the more clever approaches to learning programming I've seen in a while. The premise is simple but effective: you write real Python or JavaScript code to control your hero through dungeons, defeat ogres, and so...
Read more →There’s an old concept called Literate Programming. It never stuck or took off, but it came back to me the other day. Here is the Wikipedia explanation. My summary of this approach is to write a program (source code) as if it were a chapter i...
Read more →You know I've been using Claude Code and friends extensively in my work. To the extent that most of the python that I generated in the last month was written by Claude Code. You might know that up to recently I was teaching at Brandeis University in the Computer Science department. While teaching so...
Read more →Based on my own experience, some of my favorite books and blog posts, and advice from friends, I’ve come up with this. What do you think? What should I add? Please comment! This was my opinion back in 2015 I will create a new post showing what has changed! #### Personal Effectiveness Rules of ...
Read more →Not that anyone reads it :) I admit it's mostly for my entertainment. Tags and Collections are much better supported. The access to raindrop is better. The ui for creating posts is much nicer.
If this site looks a little different to you, it’s because I am doing a complete overhaul using Claude code. I have drunk the cool aid 100%! Over the last 2 months I’ve done a lot of “coding”. Actually very liittle coding, more directing Claude Code to code for me. I am using Python ouf of habit ...
Read more →Continuing a theme of the previous blog, I am starting to really believe that programming, coding, software development is going to be forever changed. I say this, among other things, from the perspective of someone who has taught software engineering, development, and intro programming courses. I...
Read more →You have heard how in the long distant past we had people whose job was "Computer". They were people who computed. They worked alongside mathematicians and engineers (I suppose) to make complicated calculations. I suppose they worked with strict numerical problems but also with estimates, or solving...
Read more →All the code for this new version of my web site was written by claude code. Yes, I am not exagerating. Here are some of my take aways. Amazing Yes, start with admiting that it is amazing. This is a fairly simple application but it has a fair number of moving parts. The code is all open source ...
Read more →Easing is the process of gradually increasing (or decreasing) a value to from a start to a target, without just jumping to the target. Used in computer animation. I used it for powering servos in an arm in a graceful way. There are simple Easing Equations to accomplish this.
As an experiment, we asked interviewees to cheat with ChatGPT during their interviews and share who got away with it. Here is the experiment
A 3-Question Checklist for Better Course Design Only when educators are clear on what students should gain by the end of the term can they design effective courses to get them there. Ask yourself these three simple questions when designing your next course to ensure it resonates with students.
Open Streetmaps is one of the nicest packages for maps. But using it is really messy. Prettymaps is a package that makes it easy to use OpenStreetMaps, in python. It contains a small set of Python functions to draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data. Based on osmnx, matplotlib and shapely libraries.
Guide to Strings in Python –We’ve come far in discovering the basics of computer science in the world of Python, and now is the time to start learning about strings. Strings are a fundame…