This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a series of posts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much an instructor can do: some students get it, others don’t; it’s all in genetics or other external factors […]

I just came back from a week at Hacker School in New York — they invited me to join them as a resident. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and, before I forget, here are my impressions and a bit of a comparison with the more traditional educational programs that I’m used to.

I have been meaning to put a few of the chapters of my book here. The Code Golf Style is one of my favorites; fun too, and a crowd pleaser! I’ll start with it. Here is the complete Code Golf chapter. Before I do that, here is the post I wrote some time ago explaining what […]

Back in September, I blogged about one of the the most amazing conference experiences I ever had, the OpenSimulator Community Conference (OSCC’13). This was a 2-day, purely virtual conference with a total of 360 attendees, held on an OpenSimulator virtual environment hosted here on one of my super-duper servers. I’m one of the core developers of […]

I’m happy to announce that my book Exercises in Programming Style is now available for pre-order from Amazon, and that it will be shipping starting June 9! This is the book behind the talks I gave last year at StrangeLoop and GOTO. This is the story of how this book came to life, the inspirations […]

How many more security flaws do we need to go through before people accept the fact that almost all of them have a single root cause: the use of C?

I’m officially making up these new words, because they correspond to activities that I do on a regular basis and that I need to convey to my students. I hope that by giving these concepts their very own words, they will lose the threatening overtone that these remarks usually come with — because students will […]

One of the most brutal things to adapt in life after college is the sheer amount of feedback, criticism and rejection that come with real life. This happens in just about any direction one decides to go: graduate school, industry, public service or self-employment. It may not feel that way for students, but school is […]

This post was prompted by a Facebook interaction regarding Dijktra’s famous “GO TO Statement Considered Harmful” article, a letter he sent to the editor of CACM back in 1968. Seen through the lens of currently accepted research reporting practices, Dijsktra’s article reads like a technical rant, something that we might find in today’s blogs, but […]

Virtual Reality is one of those ideas that has been part of the tech folklore for ever, but that haven’t quite taken off. Popularized in the 80s, VR has seen a number of ups and downs, hits and misses, hypes and backlashes — the most recent one being the rise and fall of Second Life. […]