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Yesterday I had some extra barbacoa that Domino was super excited about and Andrew suggested I use it to teach him (Domino, not Andrew) how to lie down on command. I waited until he lay down on his own, said “yes!” and gave him a piece of barbacoa. He leapt up and ate the barbacoa and then stood there, waiting for more. After a minute or so, he gave up and lay down again. I said “yes!” and held out another piece. This repeated ~10 times, at which point I was starting to think that he would never figure it out, when something changed. Domino seemed to realize that there was something he was doing that was turning me into a barbacoa vending machine, he just had to figure out what. He tried grabbing his bone (which he had happened to be playing with one time while laying down), sitting, moving away, and finally got it after another few repetitions. Then he lay down like a champ for the last ~5 pieces of barbacoa.

About an hour later, Andrew made a late-night snack and Domino came over, made meaningful eye contact, and then flopped down like a rug. It was adorable, and amazing to see the actual moment learning happened.

Now I just need to attach a cue to it!

Just saw Google Play Music got a free, ad-supported version (blog post). I told Andrew about it:

holyshit.

Yesterday, my team open-sourced Bazel, the build system Google uses for most of its software. We have been working on open-sourcing Bazel for over a year, extricating dependencies, renaming and refactoring, and jumping through legal and political hoops. We were still missing a lot of stuff we wanted to add, but we thought it would be useful to get a less complete project out there and start getting some feedback from “friends and family.” So we hit the “make public” button on Github and IM-ed some friends. “We on Hacker News yet?” someone joked. We checked. We were. Over the next half-hour, we rose to #1 on Hacker News and stayed there all day. Twitter exploded with hundreds of tweets about Bazel and we started getting a constant stream of issues and pull requests. Our “press the button on GitHub” meeting turned into an all-day war room, responding to users and fixing documentation and setup issues.

It was exhilarating and amazing. I knew that a lot of people were excited to try Bazel, but this response has exceeded all of my expectations.

I hope that everyone will bear with us as we work the kinks out. Hugely important missing pieces that I can think of off the top of my head:

• No binaries available – you have to compile from source.
• No externally available continuous integration – no guarantee the code is actually compiling.
• Terrible setup process – you have to manually add a WORKSPACE file and symlink the tools/ directory to make your project buildable with Bazel.

Please do give Bazel a try if you’re interested, give us feedback, and, if you hate it now, give it another try in a couple of months when we actually launch!

This weekend, Andrew and I made our own wedding rings. We’ve been married for several years, but we never got around to getting rings. We found out about a guy in NYC who does ring-making workshops: you come to his studio and spend a day making personalized, custom rings. It was fun, and now we have very special rings!

Here’s what we started with at 10am:

We made each other’s bands, so Andrew used the thin piece and I used the thick piece. The long strip was for the side rails.

We were using palladium, which we had to anneal (make hot) to make it bendy. When palladium gets hot it turns purple, which is interesting:

Once it was bendy, we used pliers to bend it into something roughly ring-shaped:

It was more D-shaped, but the point was just to connect the ends, which we soldered together:

After some shaping, we had to hammer the bands so that we could get the “beaten” appearance we wanted:

We had to re-anneal the rings several times while beating them, so they wouldn’t get brittle:

Then we had to create two more “rings” for rails and stick everything together with solder:

Finally we polished the things:

It took us twelve hours, but I think they came out pretty good:

I highly recommend it as a fun and romantic way to get wedding rings.

As a “thank you” for hosting an intern this summer, Google gave me a little Android figurine. When I took it out of its box, a little backpack fell out, too. The backpack actually zipped and unzipped, but it didn’t have anything in it. So I decided to make a Macbook Air for it.

First, I made the Apple logo at a reasonable size as a small tube:

Then I rolled out the tube to miniaturize the logo:

I didn’t roll it out quite evenly enough, so I lost the leaf. However, the apple’s shape came out pretty well:

I sliced off a piece of my “Apple tube” and dropped it into a grey rectangle for the Macbook body. Then I had to add back in the leaf. The logo was so tiny at this point that even the tip of a pin was a little big for the amount of clay I was working with:

Finally, I baked it and put it in the backpack!

I taught my first AP CS class on Thursday. I was wearing a Google teeshirt (it was a “nice” one, have to dress up for the first day of school) so the first thing the students asked me was, “Do you work for Google?” Then: “Can we visit Google?” And: “Will this help us get an internship there?”

I started out with a little “why learn programming/why programming is cool” spiel. I showed them Abundant Music and let them try out my Cardboard, both of which seemed to impress them. Next week, we’re going to discuss Net Neutrality!

I’m going to be volunteer teaching AP computer science this fall at a NYC high school! Aside from actually prepping them for the AP exam, I’ve been thinking about how to share the programming culture I love with the students. Off the top of my head, I’d like to tell them about:

Stuff you can do to program for fun:

• Hackathons
• Game jams
• Project Euler

Where programmers hang out:

• Github
• StackOverflow
• HackerNews
• IRC

Programming culture and history:

• Basic security: anyone can come up with a scheme that even they, themselves cannot break.
• How the internet/websites work.
• Notables in the field: stories about Stallman, Knuth, Linus.
• Cartoons: XKCD… there must be others.
• Obfuscated C (and other languages) contests.
• Read Joel Spolsky’s blog.

I’m sure there’s loads of stuff I’m missing. Any other ideas?

When I started at Google last year, I was really impressed by their testing. Every C++ class had three files: a <classsname>.h file, a <classsname>.cc, and a <classname>_test.cc. Every time something new is implemented, it has to be tested. The code review tool even warns you if you add a new .h without an accompanying _test.cc.

The upside to this is that I am very sure that my code does what I want. There are, of course, still bugs, but generally they’re of the “I hadn’t thought of that case” rather than the “I didn’t implement it the way I meant to” variety.

A side effect is that writing tests forces a decent separation of concerns. If you’re throwing around singletons and hiding twenty layers of functionality in a class’s privates, you’re going to have a bad time. Conversely, if you’re making things testable, each class essentially becomes a wrapper for the resource below it: “I take a database connection and add some query logic,” “I take a storage wrapper and add some app-specific logic,” “I take app responses and present it to the user.” The whole application falls into beautiful, simple layers like a mille-feuille cake.

The downside is that writing tests is so. slow. It often takes me three times as long to write a test than it did to write the code. I think that, if you’re working at a startup, it’s actually probably not a good idea to have a culture of testing like this because it will slow down your coding so much. For most startups, getting something to market in 33% of the time that 90% works is much more important than getting it to 99%. In fact, Google hasn’t always had this culture. If you look a the dark corners of the code base, there are tons of old, untested classes.

I count myself as lucky to know the guy who actually inspired the testing culture that Google has now: Mike Bland. He’s been writing a series of articles on testing for Martin Fowler’s site. If you’re interested in testing, I recommend reading them.

If you’re in NYC and thinking about volunteering, there is another TEALS information session tonight.

After my last post on TEALS, Dan Goldin generously offered to answer some questions about his experience teaching students in Kentucky (remotely from NYC).

What class are you teaching? What are they learning now?

I’m currently teaching AP Computer Science at Lee County High School in Beatyville, KY. We’ve just finished covering the material that will be on the test and are having some fun with graphics and going over some practice AP questions.

How is it teaching remotely?

It’s challenging. I expected it to be tough on the technology front with the internet and screen sharing not always working but it’s surprisingly difficult to do the administrative work online. Since it’s remote, students will be submitting homework, quizzes, and tests online or via fax and then email. This makes grading and jotting down notes more difficult than it would be with paper. Another challenge is keeping everyone engaged which requires more effort remotely than in person. At the same time, we visited the school and it was great meeting the students and the teachers. Many people have been saying that schools and colleges will start teaching remotely and this is a great opportunity to see how it actually works and what challenges can arise.

Have there been any things that surprised you?

When I first started teaching the class I approached from a college lecturer angle but quickly discovered that that approach didn’t work with high school students. With high school students it’s important to make sure everyone is engaged with requires knowing what topics the students will have trouble with and multiple ways of presenting that information. The other surprise was how different students have different learning approaches. For some, just hearing an overview is enough while others need to visualize it to understand while others need to try it out and play with it in code before they get it.

A big surprise was how much school administration time takes up. There are field trips and club meetings that will take some students out of the classroom which makes it difficult to keep everyone on the same page since different students will be missing different topics.

Anything tougher/less tough than you anticipated?

The toughest problem has been figuring out lesson plans that will appeal to different types of students and making sure each of the students are moving at the same pace. Some students will get concepts quickly while others need a bit of reinforcement. In that situation you have to balance keeping the advanced student interested while other students may need more help. Especially in computer science where concepts build on top of one another, it’s easy to get behind so it’s dangerous to move too quickly.

I expected that we’d run into a ton of technical difficulties but for the most part we’ve been pretty successful. We’ve been using Microsoft’s Lync web conferencing software that makes it easy for us to both share our screens as well as log in to the students’ sessions so we can provide one-on-one feedback. Even with the remoteness it doesn’t feel as if we’re that far apart.

What kind of time commitment is it?

In addition to the full time teacher at the school there are 4 volunteers. Two are the main teachers and two are the teaching assistants so the work gets distributed. In our case, my coteacher, Gabe, and I alternate teaching days so we only have to prep for 2.5 days a week. In the beginning when we were ramping up we spent a lot more time ramping up and doing the administrative work but now that we’re comfortable I would say that each week involves a pretty even split between teaching and the administrative side. I would say when I started I spent around 6 hours a week on the class and now it’s closer to 4.

What to you do for a living?

I work as a data scientist/engineer at a startup in New York called TripleLift.

What would you tell a coworker who was interested in volunteering?

Give it a shot! I think it’s a great way to give back and get people interested in computer science. I know I’ve gotten lucky with my schooling that led me to where I am and it’s awesome being able to provide that experience to others.

Anything else you’d like to share about it?

Teaching remotely is only a small part of the TEALS program and most are done locally at nearby schools before the work day starts. Right now the TEALS program is looking to expand so if you have any interest in volunteering definitely attend an info session or reach out to me if you have any questions. Editor’s note: if you leave a comment, Dan will make sure to get back to you.

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Thank you so much, Dan! And, I have to say, this is the first time I’ve heard someone not complain about a video conference system, so props to Microsoft Lync.