Teaching: the best way to learn.
Teaching: the best way to learn.
Edward continues his spree of systems posts. Must be something in the Boston air. Yesterday, I gave a SIPB cluedump on the use and implementation of scripts.mit.edu, the shared host service that SIPB provides to the MIT community. I derive essentially all of my sysadmin experience points from helping maintain this service. Scripts is SIPB’s [...]
I've had a rather successful tenure with autogenerated documentation, both as a writer and a reader. So when Jacob Kaplan Moss's articles on writing “great documentation” resurfaced on Reddit and had some harsh words about auto-generated documentation, I sat back a moment and thought about why autogenerated documentation leave developers with a bad taste in [...]
Attention conservation notice. The author reminisces about learning physics in high school, and claims that all too often, teaching was focused too much on concrete formulas, and not the unifying theory around them. In elementary school, you may have learned D=RT (pronounced "dirt"), that is, distance is rate multiplied with time. This was mostly lies, [...]
Last February, I posted about classes that I was going to be taking. Here are some reflections, now that final projects and examinations are over. 6.005: Software Construction. Teaching students how to engineer large software projects is one of the oddest paradoxes that you might encounter in academic life. The institute is certainly capable of [...]
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you really want a change put into an open source project, you submit a patch along with the bug report. Sure, you might complain that the average user doesn't have any programming experience and that it's unreasonable to expect them to learn some complex system and then [...]
It's a sunny day in your advanced symbolic programming class. Your teacher has just started going over monads—in Scheme, though—and you sit in the back of the classroom snarking about little tidbits of knowledge you know from Haskell. Suddenly, the teacher says (quite earnestly too), "Edward here seems to know a lot about monads. Why [...]