Author: Bruce Elgort

You’ll find this technology professor – an award-winning instructor at Clark College – working hard to inspire and challenge his students with meaningful web development and programming experiences. With a skinny vanilla latte (no foam) in hand, Bruce loves to tinker and test the boundaries of existing and emerging technologies, to then guide hungry minds through memorable, educational journeys to showcase with passion the ever-evolving innovations of society. An industry leader, Bruce is known for co-developing Elguji’s IdeaJam software, and is recognized by IBM as an ‘IBM Champion’ for being an innovative thought leader in cloud technologies.

Ten Years Ago Today

It was this day in 2003 when Danielle passed away at the age of seven. She was born with a low grade astrocytoma brain tumor. Dani was an amazing little girl. Dani never talked or walked but, was the most loving little girl you would have ever known. She was full of kisses, knew where all of the sweets were in the cupboards, was adored by her classmates in elementary school, was Alyssa’s buddy and so much more. Oh, and she absolutely loved those frozen mini-pancakes.

Dani Elgort

Dani would have turned seventeen this month. The last ten years have flown by and, not a day goes by when Gayle or I don’t think about Dani. Many of my memories were shared on my old blog. I want to thank all of you for your support over the years and especially those of you who were there ten years ago when Dani was ailing.

Today we remember Dani.

Damien Katz: What a difference a few months make

I miss Couchbase terribly, but I’m also glad to be done and start a new chapter in my career. The thing I miss most are the great people there, super bright hard working folks who amazed me on a daily basis. Which, ironically, was the thing that made it easy to leave. Seeing the different teams taking the ball and running with it without me leading the charge. Things at Couchbase grew and matured so fast I started to realize I couldn’t keep up without spending way more time working. I was no longer the catalyst that moved things forward, I was becoming the bottleneck preventing engineers from maturing and leaders from rising.

…

And now what’s next? Well, beginning in January 2014 I’ll be starting at salesforce.com and working closely with Pat Helland on a project that eventually will underpin huge amounts of their site infrastructure, improving performance, reliability and predictability, while reducing production costs dramatically.

Best of luck Damien. I remember sitting in Orlando talking with you and Julian Robichaux about CouchDb back in 2005/2006. You can do anything.

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Having Fun With Photobricks for iOS and OS X

Just a few minutes ago I discovered the Photobricks app for OS X and iOS which creates LEGO™ mosaics from photographs.

Photobricks is a completely free, ridiculously easy-to-use mosaic creation software specialized to work with LEGO® bricks. With Photobricks, you can make beautiful mosaics from your favorite images with the push of a button. For those of us who like to have more control, you can further customize the mosaic by cropping and changing the colors of individual bricks. You can then view what types of bricks you’ll need to build your mosaic and, when you’re finished with your masterpiece, you can share it in a variety of ways with others thanks to the built-in publishing options. Excited? You can start using Photobricks right now by visiting the Download page. Not convinced yet? You can check out Photobricks for Mac or Photobricks for iPhone, iPod touch to learn more about Photobricks.

Here is a mosaic of the mighty Domino Designer which will be our next LEGO™ project:

Photobricks screenshot of DominoOnce your mosaic is complete you can generate a list of the plate bricks that you need to build it:

Plate list for Photobricks

What a great app! This puts a whole new spin on LEGO™ obsession.

Don’t Distract New Programmers with OOP

Thomas Gumz sent me a link to a blog entry entitled “Don’t Distract New Programmers with OOP“. Having just wrapped up one year of teaching “Intro to Programming and Problem Solving” to students at Clark College, I could not agree more. One of the core outcomes of my class is centered around functional decomposition – how to break down a problem into smaller, simpler parts.

When I get asked “What’s a good first programming language to teach my [son / daughter / other-person-with-no-programming-experience]?” my answer has been the same for the last 5+ years: Python.

I get this same question almost on a daily basis from so many people. Admittedly, before I started teaching the class I questioned the use of Python for new programmers. Well, guess what? It’s the perfect language and I have the results to prove it.

Did we cover object oriented programming in the class – yes, but not to the level that most would expect. We did just enough for students to wrap their heads around the concept. In fact, one student tried to use OOP for their final project and had a heck of a time. In fact this student was pushing for more OOP content and after the class concluded they admitted that OOP was much harder then they expected it to be.

The shift from procedural to OO brings with it a shift from thinking about problems and solutions to thinking about architecture. That’s easy to see just by comparing a procedural Python program with an object-oriented one. The latter is almost always longer, full of extra interface and indentation and annotations. The temptation is to start moving trivial bits of code into classes and adding all these little methods and anticipating methods that aren’t needed yet but might be someday.

Be sure and read the blog entry as I think that you will agree with avoiding OOP in an introductory programming class. If you are interested in learning more about pursuing a programming career drop me an email as I would love to help.

You can read what others are saying about this article on Yacker News.

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TUAW: This is the most important Mavericks keyboard shortcut you’ll discover all day

Mavericks’ new Control-Command-Space bar shortcut came up once again during conversation in the TUAW chat room this morning. Once again, I was surprised that this cool little trick isn’t universally known.

As a public service announcement, we’d like to continue to spread the word about this delightful shortcut. Get yourself over to any text entry field on your Mavericks Mac and give it a try by pressing Control and Command together and then tap the space bar. The resulting pop-up provides easy access to smilies and emoji that you can drag to your favorite app.

emojis

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