Joined February 2008
- Tweets 3,306
- Following 646
- Followers 284
- Likes 2,720
33 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
14 Oct 2020
My book is shipping! Check it out for a myriad of strategies for bringing CS to the classroom.
13 Oct 2020
Unlock students' future potential and boost K-12 computational thinking with 𝘊𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘮, shipping now. Learn more at nostarch.com/coding-classroo…
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29 May 2022
TIL the road leading into the incinerator facility near our home is named "Mordor."
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Ryan Somma retweeted
31 Jan 2022
This was much fun! I wrote a little MVC/C# web app to send arguments to an @openscad project. It lets me easily turn my #Wordle results into STLs for #3DPrinting. Don't be too terribly surprised if I print myself a fresh Wordle pendant each morning! :)
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13 Sep 2021
Last week's news of Fantasy Flight's Keyforge card game going on indefinite hiatus because the deck-building algorithm is "broken" provides a teachable moment for Computer Science Education. youtube.com/watch?v=0kWitdxx…
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29 Aug 2021
Today's playtesting session of #VotesForWomen from @fortcircle games was a nail-biter, but @tgaw squeaked out a win in the final voting. The game is so enlightening for understanding the process for amending the US Constitution and the political strife surrounding the history.
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24 Aug 2021
As a software developer, I completely understand. I've had deployments that were supposed to take an hour take all night. This is a major software update and will be well worth the wait. @MTG_Arena
24 Aug 2021
⚠️ In Progress: Maintenance is nearing completion and we expect game clients to be live soon. Thanks for your patience. stspg.io/qzlv99ltkgn2?u=rd90…
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Ryan Somma retweeted
7 Jun 2021
I am currently 17 hrs 32 mins 30 secs of light-travel time from Earth (2021:158:000000:2L)
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4 Jun 2021
"Making up rules and seeing what happens is basically what math is." Vihart is still my favorite Math youtuber after 10 years. youtube.com/watch?v=YPKUbfIr…
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5 Apr 2021
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google today vs Oracle. The oral arguments made in October were fascinating for how the lawyers communicated complex concepts to non-technical judges using metaphors like restaurant menus as APIs. A teachable moment: c-span.org/video/?469263-1/g…
8 Mar 2021
Fun family project. I let my boys dictate a short RPG to me which I coded. I had to include a small JS framework to handle really large numbers as you start with a googol life. ideonexus.github.io/Explorab…
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7 Mar 2021
Great thread. Computers are abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions.
randomly I remembered that the original roller coaster tycoon was programmed by Chris Sawyer in assembly, which, honestly, the stones on this guy. short thread follows on why this is so ridiculous.
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28 Feb 2021
My son just explained to me that #Fortnite won't allow first-person view because players can't see--and therefore care about--their own expensive custom skins. I'm thankful for my kids educating me in digital literacy.
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26 Feb 2021
From one of the decoders of the Zodiac message. Here's a high-quality entertaining video taking viewers step-by-step through decoding the secret message in the Perseverance parachute: youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwA…
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26 Feb 2021
This was a HUGE problem for me starting out in VBscript, PHP, and Java. Having to set up a server, configure it, update environment variables, and many other arcane technical chores to output "hello world." Much more accessible to code in JavaScript, a text editor, and browser.
A thing that frustrated me a lot when I was beginning to program was not knowing, uh, where to type the code? Like I would see an example code snippet, but have no idea how to make it run.
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26 Feb 2021
I was worried about #MagicTheGathering IP getting watered down with the newly announced "Universes Beyond," but then I told my 9-year-old about it and he screamed, "Warhammer 40k Magic cards!?!? That's going to be amazing!!!" And now I'm cool with it. magic.wizards.com/en/article…
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25 Feb 2021
Three times in my career I've had young coworkers take a brief look at an existing legacy codebase and say, "I can rewrite this whole thing in [my preferred language] in just a month!" Only to give up after a week. Overly-optimistic under-scoping results in chronic overworking.
24 Feb 2021
The Perseverance parachute hides a secret message in binary, "Dare mighty things." HT @doranchak youtube.com/watch?v=lsL0dBUK…
24 Feb 2021
Modem Wars blew my mind as a teen in 1988. It was a two-player battle over 1200 baud that had different troop types and fog-of-war. Today I learned the programmer, Danielle Bunten Berry, hid this message in her code for anyone trying to crack it... (my copy was pirated). ☹️
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22 Feb 2021
The BBC has posted a 30th Anniversary edition of the text-based game Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Unlike the Zork series, I never beat this one. It was fun, but odd and nonsensical like the books. bbc.co.uk/programmes/article…
21 Feb 2021
Learned about about the history of segregation reflected in the board game Monopoly in this Atlantic article. Can you guess which of these was the black neighborhood in Atlantic city? Politics are in our games whether or not we choose to recognize it. theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…
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20 Feb 2021
The Google Photos AI periodically makes "They Grow Up So Fast" montages of my kids with clips from their infancies to present with sappy music. The AI is clearly testing how to most effectively incapacitate me into a weeping mess for when it goes to Phase II of world domination.
20 Feb 2021
I have been scanning 100s of family photos taken ~1973-2003.
Google recognizes the individuals in these photos as being the same person across the full 30 year span, even if they gained beards, weight, etc.
Should this freak me out? It's super convenient. But it freaks me out.
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