Much to the entertainment of my teammates and mentor, on Monday I punched the air and exclaimed: YES! I am a <long product name> NINJA! We’re exporting some data from this product (let’s call it Product X) and I had fixed a 3-4x expansion in the number of records it was producing. This made me […]
Tag: Programming
You might have noticed that last weekend, I overhauled the design on my blog. I felt that it was time for a change, and it’s one that is related to a change in attitude that I’ve had of late. One of the things I’ve changed is my tag-line. It’s now: Cate extends Human implements Programmer […]
Ages and ages ago, I wrote about not having imposter syndrom anymore. I wrote about how being a programmer was an accident, but a happy one. I give talks (one next week in fact) on how great it is to code. But this evening, I was trying to prep for this interview I have coming […]
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Career Planning
The other week I had a phone interview for what I thought was my dream job. In the days before, I realized that was the kind of thing I’d been doing. And then, I waited. Meanwhile, work was going so-so. My computer broke – again – so I lost a day and a half on […]
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Processing Workshop
I’ve been a little quieter than usual for a number of reasons, one of which is that I’ve been working on a workshop for the University. It’s aimed at getting 17-18 year olds interested in taking Computer Science, and I’m using Processing for that. I’m experimenting with what I’m calling an Activity Based Curriculum. I.e. […]
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What Makes a Programmer Great?
This is a post I co-wrote with Douglas Gresham. Douglas is a software engineer at Google, who blogs at www.douglasgresham.co.uk (less often than he should, go bug him for updates). I’m a graduate student, though I firmly believe that great programmers are not the result of university courses in programming. But university courses take us […]
On Tuesday, I told the lab of first years I TA that they were going to test their code. Then one of them started asking me about a quiz. Erm? No clue. So I said, no we’re going to test your code. And he talks about a quiz some more. It’s all very confusing, but […]
Here’s the slidedeck! Because I’m presenting in French I’ve kept text to a minimum: Art, Life and Programming View more documents from Cate Huston. Posts with detailed notes about what I’ll be covering and the videos (which won’t work from Slideshare – boo!): Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Art Part 3: Life Part 4: Programming
I see this problem continually in the first years I TA – they’re so overwhelmed by syntax they don’t know how to start to write the program. VB (in Excel) is especially mean about this, as if a line of code won’t compile it won’t let you go to the next one. So, having given […]
Yesterday I had to teach the distinction between pass-by-reference and pass-by-value to my first year non-CS students. There are second and third year CS students that don’t grasp this concept. But there you go. And so I explained it, to a sea of blank faces. They understood what I was saying (I think) but it […]