AirBnB weekend from hell
Greetings. If you arrived here looking for the narrative of my AirBnB weekend experience from hell, you can find it here on Google Docs.
Greetings! I’m a Professor of Computer Science, Diversity & Equity Officer/Adviser at multiple levels (EECS Department, College of Engineering, University), and Faculty Adviser for Digital Learning Strategy. I’m also a musical theater fanatic and performer, and an aficionado of computing history and retro technology.
The menu above leads to more detail about my various activities, but in a nutshell:
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My current research focuses on CS education and technology-enhanced learning, at the intersection of pedagogy, human-computer interaction, and programming systems.
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I regularly teach CS169A Intro to Software Engineering (and the accompanying CS169L project course), CS375 Teaching Techniques for CS, and sometimes the freshman seminar Our Digital Quandary, exploring issues at the intersection of computer science and society.
News…
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February 2025: Our production of CABARET at Theatre Rhinoceros, which got great reviews, was nominated for three Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle awards, including overall production, principal actor, and music direction!
Media appearances, podcasts, etc.
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Mediums, Media, and more: How storage plays a role in defining the tech that made us. Podcast hosted by Niall Kitson on TechCentral.ie, 2023.
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Reinventing education for the masses [sic]: Podcast hosted by Niall Kitson on TechCentral.ie.
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MOOCs: their history, uses, and long-term legacy. CS Education Podcast hosted by Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez at Duke University.
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Healthcare.gov’s rocky rollout. NPR On Point radio talk show, 2014.
Recent Posts
Four Shades of Gray: The Amazon Kindle Platform
This entry in the Platform Studies series (which I’ve been enjoying quite a bit, mostly for its retro tech features) focuses less on the Kindle technology, w...
Machines that took away jobs but I think it’s OK
Not long ago I got into an…interesting…conversation about machines that took away jobs. That’s actually not the conversation I’d been planning to have: I ha...
Minitel: Welcome to the Internet
Minitel: Welcome To the Internet
An open letter to Heroku regarding the end of free micro-plans
To: Bob Wise, Heroku EVP
Medieval Writers and Their Work
Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background, 1100-1500
They’re Playing Our Song
This is a really fun set of interviews by theater historian Max Wilk with some of the greatest songwriters in American history; some wrote popular songs, som...
On competency-based learning
Paul LeBlanc. Students First: Equity, Access, and Opportunity in Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021
Two books on developing regions: The Forgotten Continent, White Man’s Burden
This is a combined summary of two books that overlap a third:
The Economy of Cities
The Economy of Cities, by Jane Jacobs
Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption
Book summary: Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, by Laura J. Miller
The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us
The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us, by Paul Tough
Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine
Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine, by Jonathan Coopersmith
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable, by John Steele Gordon
Istanbul, Day 1
Erol, our private guide, came to meet us at 9am. The first stop was the site of the former Roman hippodrome. When Constantine beat out his rival to become th...
Armando’s Hamamı Experience
I’m sitting on the roof deck of my hostel in Sultanahmet, enjoying a pleasant breeze and a view of the confluence of the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus. Ma...
Istanbul Arrival
Armando and I arrived uneventfully after a 13 hour flight that should have been more uncomfortable than it was. I slept through most of the flight but Armand...
Radical Cities
Radical Cities, by Justin McGuirk: is Latin America the future of cities?
The Hacking of the American Mind
Five years ago, UCSF pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert H. Lustig came out swinging with Fat Chance, a well-argued if polemical exposé of how the processed...
Course Evaluations and the Jedi
Philip Stark, chairman of UC Berkeley’s Department of Statistics, has persuasively argued that student course evaluations often inversely correlate with teac...
Holiday Reading 2017
Every time I teach my software engineering class, I try to offer the students some more general life perspective in addition to just straight-ahead software ...
Vanishing GenX
[Note: this post was originally called Vanishing Americana but it makes more sense to call it Vanishing GenX, hence the weird permalink.] I guess one gets no...
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, by Adam Greenfield
“Damaged” by BASIC
At a recent conference I attended where a main theme of many papers was intelligent tutors to help novice programmers, an audience Q&A after one of the t...
Learn programming by gamifying? How about by reading?
On impulse I spent a couple of dollars on Amazon Marketplace to buy the out-of-print book Micro Adventure No. 1: Space Attack. It’s a “second person thinker...
The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century, by Ryan Avent. St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown
The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown, by Paul Taylor. PublicAffairs, 2016.
America in the Seventies
America in the Seventies (Culture America series) by Beth Bailey and David R. Farber. University Press of Kansas, 2004.
From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video
Joshua M. Greenberg, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
The CRT is dead, long live the CRT
I am a child of the 80s (and a little bit the 70s), and as a youngster I spent many, many quarters in arcade video games. (Tempest was among my favorites tha...
Holiday Reading 2016
I recently got to catch up with a colleague who works for a major software company (no, not Google or Microsoft) and has some similar geeky interests to my o...
Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing
Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, by Matthew Kirschenbaum.
Baltics 2016 wrap-up
“Have you been to the Baltics?” Yes. Yes, we have.
Baltics 2016 part 4: Vilnius
We arrived in Vilnius as it was getting dark, around 9pm, and as usual we were able to walk to our accommodations. This was our one non-AirBnB stay, in a hot...
Baltics 2016 part 3: Riga
We had learned from our fellow-travelers in Tallinn that the only train service in the Baltics is local suburban trains from the capitals; international trav...
Baltics 2016 part 2: Tallinn
The Old Town of Tallinn (that’s pronounced TAHL-linn) dates from medieval times, and it’s been lovingly restored, Disneyland-like, to look just like that, to...
Five slim books about teaching
Teaching books seem to try to cover several kinds of advice: procedural/administrative (how to organize a syllabus, deal with grade disputes, etc.), checklis...
The Baker coffin is a metaphor
A couple of weeks ago I got to attend my 25th reunion (MIT Class of 1990). As always for these events, the highlight for me was seeing/reconnecting with my f...
Should you self-publish? Should anybody?
Many colleagues have asked us about the experience of self-publishing our textbook. In a previous post I talked about the DIY technology I harnessed to prod...
How to visit San Francisco
Visiting? Welcome!
Where’s the low-cost Munchery?
A friend just invited me to try Munchery: It’s a delivery-only service in which noted chefs prepare a limited and healthful menu each day, and you can get st...
Impressions on judging a Hackathon
A Berkeley CS undergraduate I know who is passionate about hacking asked me this summer if I would be a judge for this weekend’s Cal Hacks hackathon—being on...
Mumbai village tour
Today Penguin and I went on a tour of a “rural” village about 90km north of Mumbai. I use the scare quotes because the village is only about 10km outside a ...
Bombay Bicycle Club
This morning, bright and early (6:15), I met my guides for the Mumbai By Bike tour. Mumbai doesn’t go to work til 9 or 10 AM, so this early there’s almost n...
Mumbai day 1
After our morning arrival in Mumbai, it was just a few blocks to the hotel, although it took a bit of orienteering to figure out in which direction. Mumbai ...
Travel and I on Indian Railways
Penguin and I ultimately decided to take a cab to Nampally railway station. I was going to take the commuter train, but the timing was such that I would’ve h...
Hyderabad day 3: Heritage walk
Our last tourist activity in Hyderabad was the most interesting: we visited what used to be the mansions built by the white-collar administrators of the Niza...
Hyderabad day 2: Chowmahalla Palace and Charminar (Hyderabad old city)
Imagine you need to get from the East Village to West 125th Street. It is rush hour on a Friday afternoon going into a holiday weekend. Because of a power ...
Hyderabad day 1: Golconda Fort and Al-Qutb Tombs
Hyderabad is unusual in being a Muslim enclave within an overwhelmingly Hindu country. This is due in part to its history: in the 15th-16th centuries it was...
SFO to Dubai to Hyderabad
Penguin and I had generally uneventful flights from SFO to Dubai and thence to Hyderabad.
MOOC 1.0: a transitional form
Every new medium needs a transitional form exemplar—something that demonstrates the new technique or technology, but just replicates the previous techniques ...
Separating scalable and non-scalable elements in CS education
UW CS chair Ed Lazowska makes the case nicely that interest in CS is booming, and that it’s not likely to be just a flash in the pan, and how are we going to...
Gallup poll: how your college experience affects fulfillment & well-being at work
This morning at my semi-monthly meeting with her, Cathy Koshland, our Vice Provost for Teaching, Learning, Academic Facilities & Programs, called my atte...
A Day in Otavalo, Ecuador
(Note: the photos from this trip are here but not integrated into the narrative like they should be.)
A demoralizing semester for instructors
DISCLAIMER: I believe most students don’t cheat, most students don’t try to make life miserable for their instructors, and most students really do want to le...
Rethinking the format of a software engineering textbook
Why did Dave Patterson and I decide in April 2011 to write a textbook for our “SaaS-flavored” CS169? Aren’t there a ton of software engineering textbooks ou...
How I got my MIT 6.004 nerd kit past airport security
As an undergrad at MIT in the late 80s, in my Digital Design and Computer Architecture courses we actually built stuff using discrete TTL parts on high-end p...
The Great Wall
Wei arranged for a private car and driver to take me to Mutianyu today. It’s a section of the Great Wall that is only about 2 hours drive from Beijing, but ...
Online education event at Tsinghua University
Quite an interesting event today. I felt like a UN delegate, experiencing the event wearing headphones for simultaneous translation: all the talks except th...
Un billon, indeed
Penguin and I had a pretty full sightseeing day—I think I logged over 16 miles, though my Fitbit turned over at midnight California time, which is about 3pm ...
We’re here, Beijing’s pretty big, and I don’t eat that part of the duck
Penguin and Armando made an uneventful 12-hour flight today—of course, all flights are uneventful if you’re booked in BusinessFirst. Check out what $7,000 b...
Kindle Fire – probably good enough
Since Dave Patterson and I have signed up to offer the first 5 weeks of Berkeley’s CS169 Software Engineering class as a free online course using Stanford’s...
For four years I learned to be a toucan
For four years, I got a brief glimpse into the life of a toucan, by learning to be one.
Needed Ebook Authoring Tools
title: “Needed: ebook authoring tools” categories: [“Education”, “Bibliomane”]
The Kindle Fire’s UI is an embarrassing abject failure
I don’t get it.
Made it to Spring Break, things still holding together!
We made it to spring break without the online course imploding! Woohoo!
The downside of online education
In the 90s, the joke was “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The anonymity of online interaction allowed you to reinvent yourself.
Week 3: No disasters yet
Our free online SaaS course is now entering its third week, with no major disasters to report!
Apprehensive, but inspired by Jennifer Widom’s blog. (And no, the book isn’t free.)
So our online SaaS class launched yesterday, with 62k students and counting.
Ready..set…d’oh
The online version of our SaaS course officially starts this coming Monday, 20-Feb-2012, although we “soft launched” this week and are putting up some of the...
CS169 x 50,000 = ?
NOTE: This is the concatenation of a few posts from early 2012 as we were planning the launch of our first MOOC on Software as a Service on Coursera and late...
Armando’s “Only in New York” for visitors
So you’re visiting my home city…you can go to the touristy stuff, or you can see some things that make New York unique among all US cities—architecturally, h...
Living with a keel-billed toucan
(Written with my then partner, Tonia Reinys Fox)
Armando’s Summer Reading 2010
I always look forward to this time of year, even though it’s inevitably a sprint to get to it. I’m preparing for our annual 2-week family vacation in Cancun...
A good first programming language, revisited
I’m of the “BASIC generation” and like David Brin I bellyache about there not being a good first language for kids to feel the empowerment I felt each time I...
Playback Twitter feeds (with icons!) on Apple //e!
From my colleague Matt Welsh (who writes the Volatile & Decentralized blog)…
Things I still find charming about the original “Star Trek”
In a mood of indulgence doubtless fueled by pizza and wine and small-batch bourbon, I used AppleTV’s unimpeachable user interface tonight to download and wat...
I’d like to disabuse early-career grad students of certain misconceptions…
You are rarely the best judge of the most important material or best presentation strategy for your talk. Corollary: Give one or more practice talks.
My new Kindle DX: the good, the bad, the executive summary
I’ve been the satisfied owner of a Kindle 1 for several months. Today I got my Kindle DX, which I pre-ordered the day it was announced. Here’s my first imp...
TiVo’s “video on demand” UI was designed by vandals in the 80’s
We have a 2nd-gen TiVo DVR as well as an AppleTV.
Gov. Schwarzenegger calls for open-source digital textbooks in CA; I hope he means e-books
In the midst of a severe budget crisis in California, Governor Schwarzenegger has called for the use of open-source digital textbooks for California schools.
Can retrocomputing bring computer-aided learning to the other 90%?
Not sure which of my colleagues (maybe Matt?) pointed me at this, or maybe I read it in one of the various pheeds, but the guys at PlayPower have observed th...
Kindle DX & the textbook & news industries
I was pretty excited about the Kindle DX announcement yesterday. In fact I had ordered an iRex iLiad Book Edition, and ended up cancelling that order to pre-...
My journey to buying a Kindle back in 2008
July 5, 2008: Why I still don’t have an eBook reader
The original, original Adventure urtext has been found!
I am just barely old enough to be familiar with the original ADVENTURE.
Brewster Kahle’s talk on “Universal access to all knowledge”
I love Brewster’s talks and his enthusiasm. Makes me think there are good things going on in the world despite others’ efforts to thwart them.
Today I am a birder
I got up on Sunday at 7am to spend the whole day watching birds. Usually I only get up early on weekends to go skiing, so this is a big deal for me. Tonia so...
Visiting Hong Kong, August 18-23, 2002
Day 1: arrival and impressions of downtown We arrived this morning after a 13-hour flight that was remarkably painless, and took one of the nicest trains eve...