Brian Danielak @capbri@qoto.org
@shriramk that sounds like an interesting paper! I've been trying to find examples of professional programmers solving problems outside of contrived laboratory settings. Could you share the citation info?
@gruber which Markdown editor is that in your screenshot?
@isabelizimm Which method do you use to publish? The "check the generated site files into version control" method or the "use CI to build the site on commit pushes" method?
@amyjko "Eduroam: Instead of fast internet somewhere, how about slow internet everywhere!"
Brian Danielak
boosted
music; Semisonic
@gvwilson I teach a lab-based introduction to engineering design, and during the last ten minutes of class we blast this song to remind students it's time to clean up. I never get tired of it.
@gruber if the original Yankee Stadium is the second-finest ballpark ever built, what's number one?
@gvwilson I get that ArduinoC is low-level and possibly needs to be to be able to handle directly reading and writing to pin, but come on. My students shouldn't need to learn pointers just to de-complexity their repeated instructions.
@gvwilson For many students in my class, this is their introduction to programming. I hate to think they'd walk away feeling like programming is about repeating a bunch of instructions over and over, instead of, to paraphrase Abelson and Susman, the act of managing complexity.
I teach an Introduction to Engineering Design course where students program Arduino-powered robots to autonomously navigate an obstacle course. I keep wishing I could have a conversation with @gvwilson because I think ArduinoC actively encourages *bad* software engineering practices. Yesterday I had to tell a student that it would be more trouble than it was worth to try to extract repeated behavior into something like a function, and my heart sank.
@kjhealy @jennybryan Thanks for the insightful blog post! I was curious, though: which function takes that argument?
Brian Danielak
boosted
Some journals think I'm a great expert when it comes to reviewing for them but a terrible researcher when authoring a paper 🤔 🤔 🤔
@kjhealy whoaaaa. It's like a Fourier Transform |> filter but so much cooler.
Brian Danielak
boosted
Please, please, stop using "foo" and "bar” in code documentation. Give us real examples that mean something. Not "if (foo > bar)," but “if (height > limit)." Not “foo++” but “counter++”. Give us a logical hook to hang our hat on, not nonsense words.
Brian Danielak
boosted
“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”
This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.
Brian Danielak
boosted
We are dropping the Dilbert comic strip because of creator Scott Adams’ racist rant: Letter from the Editor - cleveland.com https://www.cleveland.com/news/2023/02/we-are-dropping-the-dilbert-comic-strip-because-of-creator-scott-adams-racist-rant-letter-from-the-editor.html
Brian Danielak
boosted
Expanding Tidy Data Principles to Facilitate Missing Data Exploration, Visualization and Assessment of Imputations by @njtierney and @visnut #RStats #DataViz https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v105i07
Pandas; teaching
@gvwilson @robertkern as someone who just taught a winter course in pandas, I can confidently say that Michael Chow's work on tidyverse-in-Python (mainly the siuba package) meant that my students hardly ever had to deal with the index at all. Maybe I'm teaching pandas wrong? 🤔
