It’s not always about me The fall quarter at DePaul ended almost two weeks ago, and last week I finished my grading. That's a huge relief, of course, since it means I'm free from teaching until January which gives me more time for other things. The submission of grades also brings with it another…

Thankful The Fall quarter at DePaul ended on Tuesday, and in an uncharacteristic move for me, I spent my Thanksgiving morning finishing up the grading for my algorithms class. I enjoyed teaching the class so much that I didn't want the students to wait an extra day to get the results from the…

Attackers Can Use Poetry To Derail AI Safeguards

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

When they listen, again We just finished midterms at DePaul, and I am absolutely exhausted. Creating an exam for the new algorithms class along with all the other regularly scheduled things drained me, and even caused me to violate my no work on weekends rule. But I got through it. And as is…

Shaking things up Today is the first day of the third week of the quarter (yes, DePaul's mid week start in the Fall quarter confuses everyone), and we are off to a good start. The beginning of the academic year always brings more energy with it, since we've had a couple of months to reset. But…

In case anyone thinks that what's about to happen in Chicago is about crime ...

Moving on from the past I moved to Chicago to start graduate school at the University of Chicago almost 34 years ago. While I've written on this blog about how I ended up at the UC, I've never discussed my experience in graduate school. And there is a reason for that: it wasn't a good one. I doubt…

New energy for an old course People who read this blog with any regularity know that I primarily teach introductory programming. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course: there are more sections of introductory programming than anything else in the School of Computing (SoC); pedagogy and…

CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery. America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons. Watch and share his message.

Backchannel communication Today is the start of final exams at DePaul, ending the long and annoying time of quarter-system purgatory. As a result, I finished my assignment grading last week, something that I always celebrate since grading is the second most hated task of my job. (The most hated:…

A brief reprieve We have officially hit the hardest part of the academic year at DePaul, the time when everyone at a Northern Hemisphere institution on the semester system is done and posting happy graduation pictures on social media but we have another 3 weeks of our quarter. I'm not struggling…

🧪 The head of NSF's computer science directorate, Greg Hager, just resigned. "My ability to carry out my vision, to provide a voice for computing research, and to provide authentic leadership to the community are diminished to the point that I can have more impact outside NSF than within it."

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

Learning and failure If you do a search on this blog for the word "failure" you will find a lot of entries, including some dating back more than a decade. In one from 2014, I specifically talk about failure in the introductory programming classes that I teach, and re-reading it I could have…

An excellent birthday I served for many years on the SIGCSE Board, something that I enjoyed doing and something that has many fond memories associated with it. But one of the things that I did not enjoy was being away from Chicago so often on my birthday. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium often…

The vibe of 2025: "In Memoriam. Law." Seen at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.

Friends who are in Pittsburgh for 2025 SIGCSE TS: don't miss Andrea Watkins presenting our live coding work! Her presentation is Friday afternoon, and her practice talk suggests it will be amazing. A link to the paper for those like me who won't be there in person: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Software testing can literally be a matter of life and death cacm.acm.org/news/how-sof...

A form of resistance Most of January and February have felt like an endless gauntlet of bad news. I had completely forgotten the feeling of relief I had when Biden assumed the presidency of the U.S. and I stopped waking up every morning dreading the news. I definitely remember now the exhausted…

25%-50% cuts to NSF www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

Recommend Manuel's post about tenure track vs teaching track academic positions in a CS context. maperezquinones.medium.com/academic-pre...

How is this production technology? Here's Google Gemini potentially getting someone killed. Ten energy drinks is typically 1600-3000 mg of caffeine.

Pride and concern It's the start of a new calendar year, which is traditionally a time for reflecting on what you've been doing and what you might do differently. This January several things are converging to make me think about DEI and broadening participation in computing (BPC). The first event…

We’re cancelling the guilty part of guilty pleasures. Wanna read romance books and drink cheap wine? Valid. Watch the trashiest reality show and scroll through Amazon? I support this. Listen to the same early 2000s pop song a thousand times in a row? Why stop there? Find that joy and SQUEEZE.

Discouraging news I have spent a lot time thinking about and working on gender and computing. If you look at my publications, a reasonable chunk of them have to do with representation in computing, including a line of papers about the linked-courses learning community that a colleague and I ran…

I'm so excited to see my co-author Bedour Alshaigy presenting at the very first SIGCSE Virtual conference!

Are you attending SIGCSE Virtual? Don't miss the discussion on our paper How Do You Solve A Problem Like Recruitment? On The Hiring and Retention of Computing Academics. Work led by amazing Bedour Alshaigy and with fantastic co-authors Natalie Kiesler and @tasettle.bsky.social Join us on Dec 5!

Folks who think a gathering of scientists constitutes an echo chamber have likely never attended a conference.