Reading Time: 2 minutes This summer, GOTO live asked me to step in and interview one of their guests for their podcast. Simon Peyton Jones is the chair of Computing at School, the organization spearheading reform of England s national computing curriculum for children. He s also a former professor (and current Honorary Professor) at Glasgow University as well as an [ ]
Reading Time: 31 minutes I got home about a month ago from a conference tour through Romania, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I gave a talk about LLMs in all three places, and then one more time once I got home to Chicago. My plan now is to retire the talk, so I m publishing the slides and rough transcript. One [ ]
Reading Time: 21 minutes Sunlight fire-hosed through my east facing window at 5:15 AM last Wednesday. I have learned, in my eleven Chicago years, to welcome this part of summer. I scraped up a pair of shorts, tromped downstairs, and perched on the edge of my couch with a snifter of cold brew coffee. Then I opened my email: [ ]
Reading Time: 30 minutes I started teaching at the University of Chicago six years ago. Back then, in the spring 2019, students had not experienced the trauma of a centennial pandemic. They had usually done their education so far in person, and I could expect the documented results of in-person education. My classes also had a higher proportion of [ ]
Reading Time: 14 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics shouldn t be copied and pasted onto knowledge work. Then, in [ ]
Reading Time: 25 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: These traps wreak havoc in individual decision making. So, naturally, we’ve ported [ ]
Reading Time: 15 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. Tech s favorite party trick is promoting programmers into leadership roles with zero transition coaching, or even a briefing on what the role entails. The programmer accepts the promotion because I mean, of course you d accept [ ]
Reading Time: 20 minutes I made the audio version of this post available for free on my Patreon! You can subscribe to get lots of other audio recordings of blog posts, too. Let s start with cars. My students break out into groups of four, each quartet gathered around a collection of pink and green post-it notes. For the first [ ]
Reading Time: 13 minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In December of 2021, an itinerant sci-fi and fantasy gathering called Worldcon came under scrutiny for accepting a sponsorship from an American defense company. Critics remarked that the conference had clearly lost its way. [ ]
Reading Time: 35 minutes This April, I gave a talk at ETE 2024 called The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI. I think people expected me to list my predictions for profitable shovels to sell in the AI gold rush. I ve been accused of playing 4-D chess: baiting the audience who needs to hear this and switching [ ]