Month: October 2012

  • Writing Solid Code

    After 10 short years as a university-level CS instructor, I’ve finally figured out the course I was born to teach. It’s called “Writing Solid Code” and covers the following topics: Testing—There are lots of books on software testing but few that emphasize the thing I need students to learn, which is simply how to break…

  • Around Hanksville Utah

    Last weekend Sarah had a work trip so the boys and I spent a few days in the desert. The area around Hanksville–a tiny town right in the middle of Utah’s southeast quadrant that got electricity only in 1960–contains a lot of stuff I hadn’t seen yet, so we operated out of a motel there.…

  • How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof?

    Tony Hoare’s 1996 paper How Did Software Get So Reliable Without Proof? addresses the apparent paradox where software more or less works without having been either proved correct or tested on more than an infinitesimal fraction of its execution paths. Early in the paper we read: Dire warnings have been issued of the dangers of…

  • EMSOFT 2012

    I just got back from Tampere, Finland where I was one of the program chairs for EMSOFT, an embedded software conference. If I haven’t blogged about this much, it’s because I’m sort of a reluctant and not especially talented organizer of events. Happily, EMSOFT is just one third of the larger Embedded Systems Week, so…

  • University Economics and the End of Large Classes

    I’ve been stalled on a draft of this piece for some time, but Amy Bruckman’s recent post provided the catalyst I needed to finish it up. She hypothesizes that “the future of universities is excelling at everything a MOOC is not.” Clearly universities can excel at activities that require students to be near each other and…

  • Of Course It’s an Interview

    Arvind Narayanan wrote a mostly very good piece about some things that surprised him while interviewing for faculty jobs. One of them, “it’s not an interview,” was a surprise to me as well, since it’s wrong. There’s no doubt variation among individuals, but here are a few things I try to find out during a faculty…

  • Economics of University Teaching

    Today I wanted to ask a simple, specific question: How does my salary relate to the amount of teaching that I do? Let’s take a look: I’m paid $105,000 per year, so with benefits I probably cost $150,000. Sabbaticals increase my cost by about 13%. An in-state student will pay $6500 in tuition for 26 credit hours of…