Programming
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Exploring a Conference Hashtag: Part 3
→: Exploring a Conference Hashtag: Part 3I wanted to explore temporal rhythms around the conference, for example to pick out more popular or particularly tweet-able sessions. Color scheme: Is directed at someone by starting with an @ Contains a mention (@) of someone else Contains a link Disappointingly, no patterns are immediately obvious here – it seems like tweeting was reasonably consistent throughout. I…
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Part 8: Who’s Talking About The Future of Newspapers?
→: Part 8: Who’s Talking About The Future of Newspapers?I’m working on a paper on topical communities, and as part of that I’ve come back to this dataset to explore the social network that emerges through @ mentions. To start with, I looked at the social network that emerges when we look at the people on the list. This network is pretty densely connected,…
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Simplicity and God Objects
→: Simplicity and God ObjectsThere’s an anti-pattern in Object Oriented programming called “God object” or “God class”. An pattern is a design to follow. An anti-pattern is something to avoid. A God class is a class that knows and/or does too much. Breaking a problem down into well-defined units of limited scope is part of writing good code that…
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Sunflower Layout in Processing
→: Sunflower Layout in ProcessingFor a while, I’ve been wanting to make something that explores color in photo sets. Reading Beautiful Visualization (Amazon), I came across the perfect way to arrange the elements. It imitates the layout of the sunflower seeds, “the most efficient and visually mesmerizing way of packing small elements into a large circle”. I decided to…
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Why I’m Not a Teacher
→: Why I’m Not a TeacherThere was a interesting post on the Computing Education blog about a month ago, suggesting that the best hope for CS education was to take existing teachers and train them to teach CS, rather than to try and get CS majors into teaching (you can find it here, there’s also good discussion in the comments).…
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Books to Read Before You Graduate: Design Patterns
→: Books to Read Before You Graduate: Design PatternsDesign Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software – I had to read and study this for a class, and then we played Design Pattern Poker, where we “played” the design patterns we had in order to solve a problem. Seemed like nonsense at first, but then I read the book. And saw solutions that I’d…
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Building, Not Destroying
→: Building, Not DestroyingWhen I was 5 or 6, the school thought I had learning difficulties because I couldn’t read. It transpired that it wasn’t so much couldn’t – as wouldn’t. I refused to read the nonsense little books about Little Jonny Red Hat. Clearly my aversion to things that I find pointless started at a young age. Once…
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Experimenting with a Visual, Activity-Based Curriculum
→: Experimenting with a Visual, Activity-Based CurriculumWhen I left Ottawa, I had to find the new me to run my Processing Workshop. His name is Ali and he’s awesome. He’s had the idea to write up the ideas into a paper, so we’re working on that at the moment, but it occurred to me that I didn’t write much about it…
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Being Dispensable
→: Being DispensableI heard a horrible story the other day – someone had been off work because they were seriously ill, and a week before they returned to work one of their colleagues called all her clients and said she was never coming back. Shocking, right? Bitchy! Horrifying. Disgusting behavior. Hurtful. The last thing you need. If…