It's easier to read and contribute to code when it's stylistically consistent. This is a reason why we have PEP 8, the style guide for Python code. It says things like: Avoid extraneous whitespace in …

Someone discovered "that the addition of 'Harry' to almost any Plato quote makes it seem legitimately like a nugget of wisdom out of the mouth of Albus Dumbledore." This reminded me to look up my …

Problem 1: Food at tech meetups usually fails to satisfy foodies. Make-your-own-tacos if you're lucky, "the Statue of Liberty is crying" bad pizza if you're not. Problem 2: Most places we hold evening tech talks …

At Hacker School, I'm working on little projects to teach myself various things. I am following my own advice by embracing silliness. A few things I have made, all of which now have code up …

I spent a day at Hacker School without a working pair of headphones recently. So I spent about three hours pairing, which I loved and which I'm going to repeat every day that I can. …

So, there are random non-programming reasons why I didn't feel like I made much progress yesterday -- I tried working in a beanbag chair (no good for Sumana), I drank coffee too early in the …

Mel Chua visited Hacker School last week and especially entreatied us to blog about bad days, days we felt demoralized or unproductive. It helps her with her research. Well, Mel, here you go. It's a …

Yesterday I tried to diagnose and fix a bug in an open source project. I got discouraged because of a few factors, so I'm noting down a few things I ran into, for future Sumana …

The Hacker School application form asks you to provide some code you've written so the faculty can look at it. I wrote a game: "Where on the Oregon Trail is Carmen Sandiego?" It is a …

Or: you are an expert if you can save people time. Late in 2011, I found out that one of my colleagues, a whip-smart and infinitely organized administrator, wanted to know more about how the …