In conversations with people who are much smarter about education than am I, one idea that came up was this notion of foundational knowledge. To define “foundational knowledge” by analogy think of learning basic arithmetic. First you learn addition then s[...]

One thing Dr. Hermans mentioned in her book is retrieval practice. I have heard this term in other pedagogical literature. It basically means trying to remember some piece of information without reference to a memory aid.

I cannot be sure–I don’t know if there’s any formal diagnostic that a mental health professional can perform to diagnose impostor syndrome (assuming it’s even a recognized mental health concern). So I won’t say that I suffer from impostor syndrome but it’[...]

So I started my morning, as I often do, by looking at Twitter. It’s better than a demitasse of espresso in terms of raising my blood pressure. One thing I see over and over again on Twitter is the rather common false dilemma logical fallacy. And this fall[...]

Last year I had several friends inquire if I was going to stage another DetroitDevDay. I had taken over from my dear friend Dave McKinnon and I had run it for a couple of go-rounds. Honestly though, I was getting a bit worried that DetroitDevDay was becom[...]

We (the folks who previously put on the DetroitDevDay conference) are going to be starting a new annual event on June 29, 2019 at TechTown in Detroit. I will share more details here as I get them but I wanted to make sure folks are aware.

I’ve been having a conversation with some folks on Twitter about their evidence that mob programming makes Brooks’ Law irrelevant. Someone offered evidence based upon his own experience that mob programming breaks this rule.  I hope I’m not mischaracteriz[...]

I am very excited to be helping with the inaugural Detroit.Code conference here in July 2017.  In fact all of us that work on the DetroitDevDay conference are very excited about this new conference.  We all support growing the metro Detroit software devel[...]

I’ve updated the Chocolatey NuGet (CNG) packages for Elixir, Erlang and Rebar.  If you’re unfamiliar with CNG it’s analogous to apt-get on Ubuntu or yum/dnf on Fedora except it’s for Windows. The Elixir (v1.4.4) and Erlang (v19.3) are already visible and [...]

After a bit of discussion and debate a few of us have decided to go ahead with the Detroit Day of Functional on March 25, 2017. Detroit Labs is kind enough to let us borrow their space for the day so that’s where we’ll have it. We’re charging $30 a ticket[...]