Disqus - Latest Comments for catherinedevlin

Re: How to enable key repeats on your Mac

catherinedevlin — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 17:41:57 -0000

Thank you, you just healed one of my larger annoyances with Macs!

Re: My Saddest Good Friday in Memory: When Treasured Things are Dead

catherinedevlin — Sat, 15 Apr 2017 02:23:27 -0000

I almost wish you hadn't spoken up for us, for LGBT Christians, because why should anybody suffer who's able to avoid it? Why should the hammer come down on you, too? Why give them another target, when their ammunition is limitless? Stand clear, save yourself!

But... but that dishonors your courage. I can't value your good heart while wishing it would not do what good hearts do.

Thank you.

Re: Julia Elman | Leaving 18F

catherinedevlin — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 21:32:37 -0000

It has been such a huge honor and pleasure to work with you. Thank you.

Re: Kim's Tech Blog

catherinedevlin — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 06:32:52 -0000

Thank you SO much - that "missing shebang" error on an ENTRYPOINT script is nasty!

Re: Follow Friday: Transgender Christians

catherinedevlin — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:40:06 -0000

I do wish I could join some kind of "Look Me In The Eye When You Say That About Me" team that would go around helping people understand that it's actual living human beings they're sneering at, not anonymous demonic enemies. I'm not a principality or a power, I'm a person.

Re: The Absurd Legalism of Gender Roles, Exhibit D: ‘Biblical’ Manipulation

catherinedevlin — Sat, 12 Mar 2016 16:38:48 -0000

We see this series of posts for what it really is: a thinly veiled opportunity for Rachel to boast about what an awesome guy she's got.

I'm joking! But I do "How To Have a Marriage Less Like the Evans'" and related books by Piper, etc. will fail to influence the Christian community. We don't need to be low-fidelity Roman Empire reenactors, we need to be Christ's hands and feet in the real world.

Re: A Proposed “Religious Freedom” Bill in West Virginia Would Let Believers Avoid All Sorts of Laws

catherinedevlin — Sat, 06 Feb 2016 00:28:43 -0000

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law", it seems. I have to admit, I'm a little surprised to find such Crowley fans in the West Virginia legislature

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 23:16:49 -0000

plugins: Stevedore

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 14:56:07 -0000

Makefiles

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 19:10:53 -0000

static analysis: requires.io, codeclimate

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Wed, 09 Dec 2015 18:46:32 -0000

mocking in tests

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Fri, 13 Nov 2015 09:13:34 -0000

zen: of Python; of JavaScript (https://www.youtube.com/wat...

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 12:35:35 -0000

Elixir: http://elixir-lang.org/

Re: 10 Questions for Complementarians Regarding “Boys’ Toys” and “Girls’ Toys”

catherinedevlin — Thu, 13 Aug 2015 13:54:24 -0000

Everything you said, so much.

Why are the people who insist that all our currently-traditional gender restrictions are inherent, inborn, instinctive, and natural always the same ones who shriek with terror anytime their enforcement is relaxed? Where did all that confidence in their naturalness go?

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:57:08 -0000

ECMAScript6

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Fri, 29 May 2015 13:11:06 -0000

polymer-project: build custom HTML elements - https://www.polymer-project...

Re: loops in R

catherinedevlin — Thu, 16 Apr 2015 18:56:20 -0000

Good pace, and I like pointing out the computer's power to iterate as a sort of motivating example: here's how to shove boring and repetitive work off onto a computer.

In my experience new students have an incredibly hard time understanding the function of the counter/index variable, and it seemed like you were fumbling for a way to describe it, but I don't think your explanation would break through that understanding barrier. Unless you can come up with a fantastic verbal description (I never have yet) I wonder if the best technique might be to show what it does first and only then, with a working example up, try to describe it.

Re: Strong Enough to Be Self-Critical: In America and the church

catherinedevlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 12:18:13 -0000

It's funny that humility is such a controversial stance. But, upon reflection, I shouldn't be surprised.

Re: Finding Things in the Unix Shell

catherinedevlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 11:42:15 -0000

I think it depends on whether those commands were part of the lesson. I didn't actually see any of them (including `head`) in http://swcarpentry.github.i... so I'm not sure what lesson question 2 corresponds to.

For questions to test whether they've picked up the basic meaning of commands, I can't think of how else to test it than to throw it in with a bunch of other commands.

But this isn't a question that's going to expose deep and subtle logic flaws. Nothing here is going to unveil the sneaky sort of misunderstanding.

Re: Multiple Choice Questions

catherinedevlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 08:52:03 -0000

Nice quick-answer questions, and good choice of common distractors.

Although, for #1, using `list` as a variable name then overrides the keyword `list` for the data type. Python will let you do it, but then you get problems later in the session if you try something like `isinstance([1,2,3], list)`. It's nothing relevant to this lesson, but best not to let students see an example of getting away with using a type name as a variable name.

Re: Multiple Choice Questions for SQL

catherinedevlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 08:46:15 -0000

For question #1, I'm impressed that you came up with a good terminology-testing MCQ. When I was working on another lesson, I couldn't come up with an MCQ to test vocabulary that had plausible distractors.

For #2, the distractors are VERY plausible but I'm afraid you're testing dialect-specific SQL!

```catherine=# create table a (a numeric); insert into a values (0.0), (1.0), (2.0), (3.0), (null);
catherine=# select avg(a) from a;

avg
--------------------
1.5000000000000000
```
Got the same result in SQLite3. What dialect are you using, MySQL? MySQL is infamous for being the *least* standards-compliant common RDBMS...

Re: Adding a Second Post to the GitHub Blog

catherinedevlin — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 08:18:39 -0000

Since `git add` is a specific technical term, I was temporariy confused by "You’ve successfully cloned the training course repository and added your first GitHub blog post. " - did that mean that I'd performed `git add` on my-post.md? Had to read through it a couple times to understand that you meant that we'd already completed the whole process for the first post, all the way through having the pull request merged into the upstream.

And I agree with Mike, this might be an OK MCQ on a test where the students can take some time, but it takes too long to consume for a quick on-the-fly MCQ to throw out during the lecture.

I never knew you could specify a single file to commit. I'd always just used `git add` for all the files and then a bare `git commit` to commit everything that had been added. So I learned something from your MCQ (even though I rated myself 8 on git!)

I like choosing our own submission workflow as a topic; very dogfoody!

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 00:30:04 -0000

12factor.net

Re: About the Dayton Dynamic Language User Group

catherinedevlin — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 13:38:17 -0000

ArchieML

Re: Programming with Databases

catherinedevlin — Sun, 01 Mar 2015 21:16:31 -0000

I agree with Belinda - I think this is too much to teach in the time! - and, correpondingly, too much to absorb from one map. I'm an infamous overteacher so I sympathize - there's so much great stuff to teach people here!

Chopped into maybe 3 parts, though, it would probably work well.