Once again explaining to a junior colleague that when an employer says, "If you feel you deserve a raise, please bring it up with your manager," they know full well that the "you" means "self-confident extroverts". 1/ Employers that genuinely care about treating their staff well don't put this burden on employees: they schedule regular performance reviews, and _they_ bring up the subject of salary increases. 2/

"Software Design for Data Scientists"
Rule 0: Computer scientists aren't taught software design either, so don't feel like you've missed something.
Rule 1: Design for people's cognitive capacity (7±2, chunking, and all that)
...more Rule 2: Design toward widely-used abstractions and maximize the ratio of "what's unique in this statement" to boilerplate, bu remember that the tradeoff between abstraction and comprehension depends on how much people already know
...more

So why JavaScript for stjs.tech instead of TypeScript? 1. Adding explicit types didn't spark any discussion of design that wasn't already there. (If everything a character says or does in a novel can be said or done by someone else, take them out.) 2. Research shows that static type declarations have at best a small positive impact on readability and maintainability, and when code has to fit o a printed page, I think the extra line-wrapping outweighs the benefits.

A lot of papers are going to appear in '21 and '22 analyzing how (and how well) people moved their classroom teaching online on short notice, but something even more interesting is happening right now that I bet will get much less attention. 1/4 My guitar teacher is now giving lessons online. My daughter's karate sensei is teaching via Zoom. Millions of free-range teachers have moved online with equally short notice, but without the shackles of final exams or an LMS. 2//4

@judell Sadly I @judell think that

When I see a novice programmer doing complex substring matches instead of using regular expressions, my first thought these days isn't, "They're stupid," it's, "I should have taught or explained something sooner or more clearly." 1/5 Similarly, when someone in tech whom I think has good intentions says something naive about computing education (or about poverty or intellectual property or whatever), my first question these days is, "OK, so where I reasonably expect them to have learned about that?" 2/5

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was convinced that all of our tools were fundamentally wrong, and that we'd only make real progress in computing if we rethought them. 1/4 I now realize this was displacement: I focused on tools because I knew how to fix them (or at least change them), and because if the problem was tools, I wouldn't have to worry about fuzzy sociological stuff that made me very uncomfortable. 2/4

Again: the single most useful training you can give an adult is how to run a meeting and how to participate in someone else's. The world is mostly run by lawyers, MBAs, and military officers because they're taught this as a first-class skill. 1. Decide if there actually needs to be a meeting. If the only purpose is to share information, send a brief email instead.