We are nearly one week into the 2026 - 2027 academic year at DePaul, and it's a big one for me. I'm celebrating my thirtieth year at DePaul. Yes, that's right: I started at DePaul way back in September 1996, making my DePaul career older than Google. It both feels like forever and also like yesterday when I began working here while I was finishing my graduate work.

It's August, which is a fun time for those of us at DePaul. We had an entire month of summer and have thus decompressed from classes a bit, but we still have a month of summer to go since classes don't start until September. This year August is especially sweet since at this moment I have five weeks until our fall quarter start date.

It's mid July, which means it's high summer for DePaul faculty without summer teaching or an administrative position. We don't return to the classroom until September 9th, so we still have almost two months of unscheduled time to fill however we like. That makes it a weird time for me to be talking about graduation, which took place about a month ago.

The spring quarter at DePaul just finished, and with it I wrapped up my third round of teaching algorithms. I remember last year at this time when I was nervously looking forward to teaching algorithms for the first time in decades. It has turned out to be one of the best things I've done professionally in years, and I'm happy that I took the leap and signed up for the class a year ago.

If you have been reading this blog for more than a few years, you know that late in 2022 I made a few resolutions. One of those was to understand better why students in introductory Python classes use else:pass in their code. I'm happy to report that I've finally begun working on that project, thanks to a class that I'm teaching for the first time this quarter.

I'm writing this blog post to share that I was wrong in something I wrote a few years ago. At the time, a student had drawn a picture of my three cats based on my stories of them from class. When he finished the second programming class, he framed the drawing as a gift for me. It was incredibly thoughtful, and I was touched by the gift, so I wrote a post called…

Today is the first day of the fourth week of spring quarter at DePaul. Happily, I am finding myself less tired than I typically am almost halfway through the spring quarter. I took on an expanded advising role this academic year, which comes with a course reduction, something that my college hasn't historically offered very much. Because of the classes I teach, it happens that spring quarter is the easiest for me to have a reduced load, which is a happy coincidence since it's the end of the academic year and when I am at my most tired.

I just finished grading my second final exam, so I am done with the winter quarter (other than filing grades with the university). I still need to prepare my spring quarter class, but I hope to get that done with enough time to enjoy some of spring break next week. This was a tough quarter for a lot of reasons that I'm not going to depress anyone by listing.

The Winter quarter in my school has, at least for the past decade or so, been a time when we do a lot of interviewing for faculty positions. At first this was because of growth in our programs, but more recently it has been because of a good number of faculty retirements (and a few faculty deaths). It's both an exciting time, because who doesn't love thinking about new colleagues, and an exhausting time, because all of those candidates need to meet people and have attendees at their talks.

This is the end of the third week of the Winter quarter at DePaul, which means I'm almost a third of the way through my two classes. This is the second round of my new iteration of algorithms, and I feel like it's better than the first time I taught it. I remember everything much better, which makes things smoother when I improvise during class (I HATE pre-prepared slides and typically use documents with details missing that I fill in using the tablet computer as I go).

The fall quarter at DePaul ended almost two weeks ago, and last week I finished my grading. That's a huge relief, of course, since it means I'm free from teaching until January which gives me more time for other things. The submission of grades also brings with it another round of DePaul course evaluations. This quarter course evaluations were especially important since I was teaching algorithms for the first time in about 20 years, so I wanted to hear from the students about it.

The Fall quarter at DePaul ended on Tuesday, and in an uncharacteristic move for me, I spent my Thanksgiving morning finishing up the grading for my algorithms class. I enjoyed teaching the class so much that I didn't want the students to wait an extra day to get the results from the final exam. And I'll have more fun shopping with my son tomorrow knowing that my grades are posted.

In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at how poetry elides AI safeguards, the new boom in nuclear power, sourcing rare earths from seaweed, and more.

We just finished midterms at DePaul, and I am absolutely exhausted. Creating an exam for the new algorithms class along with all the other regularly scheduled things drained me, and even caused me to violate my no work on weekends rule. But I got through it. And as is typical for me (see here and here and here and many more), the exam notes brought a moment of happiness for me.

Today is the first day of the third week of the quarter (yes, DePaul's mid week start in the Fall quarter confuses everyone), and we are off to a good start. The beginning of the academic year always brings more energy with it, since we've had a couple of months to reset. But this Fall quarter feels different for me than recent ones.

The Chicago Police Department’s criminal homicide tally for June, July and August is the lowest in 60 years. And overall violent crime remains near its lowest point in more than four decades.

I moved to Chicago to start graduate school at the University of Chicago almost 34 years ago. While I've written on this blog about how I ended up at the UC, I've never discussed my experience in graduate school. And there is a reason for that: it wasn't a good one. I doubt many Ph.D. students look back fondly on graduate school, but mine had some significant bumps all the way from my first quarter up until my thesis defense.

People who read this blog with any regularity know that I primarily teach introductory programming. There are a lot of reasons for that, of course: there are more sections of introductory programming than anything else in the School of Computing (SoC); pedagogy and learning for introductory programming is one of my research areas and as a result is very interesting to me; I have long served as the course mentor for several introductory programming courses and staying connected to the courses is important; …

Today is the start of final exams at DePaul, ending the long and annoying time of quarter-system purgatory. As a result, I finished my assignment grading last week, something that I always celebrate since grading is the second most hated task of my job. (The most hated: meetings, of course). One of the things that makes grading slightly more palatable to me is when students include unnecessary, but illuminating and sometimes fun, comments in their assignment submissions.

We have officially hit the hardest part of the academic year at DePaul, the time when everyone at a Northern Hemisphere institution on the semester system is done and posting happy graduation pictures on social media but we have another 3 weeks of our quarter. I'm not struggling as much this spring as I have in the past, partly because the students in one of my classes are particularly engaged and are making it easier to keep my energy up.

Last week, CRA shared the news that Greg Hager would be stepping down as NSF Assistant Director for the CISE Directorate. As a follow-up to that announcement, we are sharing the following letter fr…

If you do a search on this blog for the word "failure" you will find a lot of entries, including some dating back more than a decade. In one from 2014, I specifically talk about failure in the introductory programming classes that I teach, and re-reading it I could have written that entry this January, not more than 11 years ago.

I served for many years on the SIGCSE Board, something that I enjoyed doing and something that has many fond memories associated with it. But one of the things that I did not enjoy was being away from Chicago so often on my birthday. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium often happens in early March, and part of the duties of serving on the SIGCSE Board is attending the conference.

Most of January and February have felt like an endless gauntlet of bad news. I had completely forgotten the feeling of relief I had when Biden assumed the presidency of the U.S. and I stopped waking up every morning dreading the news. I definitely remember now the exhausted feeling that comes from constant chaos, except of course that the dread is much worse this time around.

National Science Foundation staff heard the plans at a meeting Tuesday.

The confusion between Teaching-Track and Tenure-Track is creating a class system in academia.

It's the start of a new calendar year, which is traditionally a time for reflecting on what you've been doing and what you might do differently. This January several things are converging to make me think about DEI and broadening participation in computing (BPC). The first event that got me thinking was a talk today by Dale Reed from UIC who shared information about the UIC BPC plan and various approaches they've taken in implementing it.

I have spent a lot time thinking about and working on gender and computing. If you look at my publications, a reasonable chunk of them have to do with representation in computing, including a line of papers about the linked-courses learning community that a colleague and I ran for five years. Of course, I engaged with the issue personally for many, many years before that, experiencing bias that caused me to question continuing with the field at various points.

Yesterday was the last day of the Fall quarter at DePaul, and it was a surprisingly good quarter for me. I had two groups of highly engaged students, and for the first time in a long time I didn&#8…