joy of code 2014, imitation game with Turing, more diverse zeitgeist

hi all. seems like only a blink since the 2013 compilation. its been a very eventful/ buzzing year in coder/ CS world. these links are an attempt to capture some of the zeitgeist.

its definitely never a dull moment in the IT/CS field and these links attest to that.

the hollywood angle continues with the release of the major motion picture Imitation Game about Turing in WWII, a big deal which this post is timed with. releases in a week. have long thought this would make a brilliant movie and amazed it took hollywood so long to seize on it. certainly understandably, movies with mathematicians in the lead roles are rather rare, but WWII movies are a dime a dozen… starring Benedict Cummerbatch and Keira Knightly, both stars possibly at the very top of their careers. [a]

the resources for people interested in learning about coding are quite copious on the internet.[b][c][d][e][i] theres a new phenomenon of a rise in “coding bootcamps”.[f] get a taste of advanced university topics in [g]. theres a lot of debate about “computer literacy” and how important it is to know computer languages.[h]

and the silicon valley, startup, and corporate elements of coding are going full blast.[j]

a very major and impassioned topic over the last year is gender disparity/ balance/ diversity in the tech field.[k]

is it a bubble? demand is very hot and there are record enrollments in CS classes.[l]

the market for software engineering is keen.[m]

lots of fascinating writing on the massive universe of computer languages.[n]

the leaders of the field are out all over the place.[o]

zuckerberg and facebook are in a “category of their own”.[p]

its great to see big awards for CS breakthroughs and innovation.[q]

there are many community sites & coding competitions.[r]

and take a break with fun/ entertainment/ humor.[s]

quality/ design issues are at the forefront of the software onslaught.[t]

and the history of CS is very colorful.[u]

• a. imitation game movie/ Turing
• b. learn/teach
• c. code.org/ “hour of code”
• d. examples
• e. play/ games
• f. bootcamps
• g. advanced/university
• h. edu opinion
• i. orgs/ sites
• j. corps, silivalley, startup
• k. gender/ race balance/ diversity
• l. hot/ demand/ bubble
• m. market
• n. languages
• o. celeb/ leaders
• p. zuckerberg/ facebook
• q. awards
• r. competition/ community/ sites
• s. fun/ entertainment/ humor
• t. quality/ design
• u. history

a. imitation game movie/ Turing

• 1. The Imitation Game (2014) – IMDb
• 2. Benedict Cumberbatch is Alan Turing with Keira Knightley in The Imitation Game | Mail Online
• 3. Keira Knightley on ‘The Imitation Game’ – YouTube
• 4. Keira Knightley holds hands with husband James Righton as they leave The Imitation Game premiere | Daily Mail Online
• 5. The Imitation Game – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• 6. The Imitation Game, review: ‘clever, calculated’ – Telegraph
• 7. ‘The Imitation Game’ Review: Benedict Cumberbatch Triumphs in a Classy but Conventional Bio-pic | Variety
• 8. Benedict Cumberbatch foils Nazis in Oscar-caliber ‘Imitation Game’ | New York Post
• 9. Keira Knightley and Benedict Cumberbatch promote The Imitation Game at Governors Awards | Daily Mail Online
• 10. The Imitation Game: who were the real Bletchley Park codebreakers? – Telegraph
• 11. Keira Knightley discusses The Imitation Game and feminism on Good Morning America | Daily Mail Online
• 12. Keira Knightle on break from promoting The Imitation Game | Daily Mail Online
• 13. What Fame Looks Like for Benedict Cumberbatch — Vulture
• 14. ✔ The Imitation Game

b. learn/teach

• 1. Book That Teaches Kids to Code Raises $250K on Kickstarter | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 2. This Is Your Brain On Code, According To Functional MRI Imaging ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community
• 3. How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary by Robert L. Read

c. code.org/ “hour of code”

• 1. ‘Hour of Code’ event aims to demystify computer science | Education Lab Blog | Seattle Times
• 2. Cassidy: Code.org Hour of Code builds a deeper understanding of the power of computing – Inside Bay Area
• 3. Schools Aren’t Teaching Kids To Code; Here’s Who Is Filling The Gap – ReadWrite
• 4. “Don’t Just Play on Your Phone, Program It” | The White House

d. examples

• 1. To Divide the Rent, Start With a Triangle – NYTimes.com
• 2. Visualizing Algorithms
• 3. I Am Code and So Can You – Wired Science
• 4. The Questions That Computers Can Never Answer – Wired Science
• 5. The Overview Project » Algorithms are not enough: lessons bringing computer science to journalism

e. play/ games

• 1. Babes in a Digital Toyland – Even 3-Year-Olds Get Gadgets – NYTimes.com
• 2. New Minecraft Mod Teaches You Code as You Play | WIRED
• 3. The 75-Year Saga Behind a Game That Teaches Preschoolers to Code | Enterprise | WIRED
• 4. This Drool-Worthy $99 Kit Lets Kids Build Their Own Computers | Wired Design | Wired.com
• 5. Why Your Employees Should Be Playing With Lego Robots – Colin Lewis – Harvard Business Review
• 6. Doctor Who and the Dalek: 10-year-old tests BBC programming game • The Register
• 7. What if coding were a game? – Microsoft Research Connections Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

f. bootcamps

• 1. Boom or bust: The lowdown on code academies | Application Development – InfoWorld
• 2. California Cracks Down on Hacker Boot Camps | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 3. California regulator seeks to shut down ‘learn to code’ bootcamps | VentureBeat | Education | by Christina Farr
• 4. Coding bootcamp: A college alternative – Video – Personal Finance

g. advanced/university

• 1. A Course on Complexity Theory | Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP
• 2. Computational Complexity: Things a Complexity Theorist Should Do At Least Once
• 3. P vs NP on TV – Computerphile – YouTube
• 4. Research-Life Stories | Windows On Theory
• 5. The camel has two humps (working title)
• 6. The Geomblog: Things a TCSer should have done at least once
• 7. For the best ROI, get your computer science degree at a state school | ITworld
• 8. Why CS? | Computer Science Department The University of Texas at Austin
• 9. Top Computer Science Universities in the World | US News Best Global Universities
• 10. 50th Anniversary Symposium | Department of Computer Science

h. edu opinion

• 1. Digital Literacy Is the Key to the Future, But We Still Don’t Know What It Means | WIRED
• 2. Students Who Push Tech Boundaries Should Be Encouraged, Not Punished | Opinion | WIRED
• 3. The Danger of Requiring Computer Science in K-12 Schools | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM
• 4. Who Says Math Has to Be Boring? – NYTimes.com
• 5. The Joy of Teaching Computer Science in the Age of Facebook – Hope Reese – The Atlantic
• 6. Computing at School: rethinking how computing is taught – Microsoft Research Connections Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs
• 7. You Shouldn’t Have to Learn How to Code | Emmanuel Straschnov
• 8. How To Criticizing Computer Scientists

i. orgs/ sites

• 1. Computing At School :: Computing for the Next Generation …
• 2. The Computing Universe A Journey through a Revolution | Computing: general interest | Cambridge University Press
• 3. 10 places where anyone can learn to code | TED Blog
• 4. CodeBabes: The More Code You Learn, The Less The Instructors Wear | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
• 5. Google Summer of Code 2014 – Home page
• 6. Out in the Open: The Site That Teaches You to Code Well Enough to Get a Job | WIRED

j. corps, silivalley, startup

• 1. Apple beats Google and Samsung to the title of world’s most valuable brand | Daily Mail Online
• 2. Here’s Why It Is Hard For Engineers To Fit In Corporate World! – YouTube
• 3. One Startup’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Gold Rush | Business | WIRED
• 4. Microsoft Will Cut up to 18,000 Jobs | Re/code
• 5. Meet ‘Project Zero,’ Google’s Secret Team of Bug-Hunting Hackers | Threat Level | WIRED
• 6. Hanging Out With the Minds Behind Google Doodles and Chrome Experiments – The Daily Beast
• 7. Here’s Why You Probably Won’t Get Hired At Google – Yahoo Finance
• 8. Silicon Valley’s “Body Shop” Secret: Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants | NBC Bay Area
• 9. Job brokers steal wages, entrap Indian tech workers in US – The Center for Investigative Reporting
• 10. Graphic novel: Techsploitation – The Center for Investigative Reporting
• 11. Federal tech contracts awarded to job brokers with labor violations – The Center for Investigative Reporting
• 12. Job brokers steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in US | US news | The Guardian
• 13. The real reason Reddit’s CEO stepped down
• 14. Meet Your New Boss, Mr. Algorithm | TechCrunch
• 15. Google Back in Court to Defend Future of Programming | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

k. gender/ race balance/ diversity

• 1. An ‘Ether Of Sexism’ Doesn’t Explain Gender Disparities In Science And Tech
• 2. Grace Hopper Celebration
• 3. I’m an engineer, not a cheerleader. Let’s abandon silly rules about gender roles.
• 4. In a First, Women Outnumber Men in Berkeley Computer Science Course | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 5. Made with Code_Google
• 6. Neurosexism: Brains, Gender and Tech | Re/code
• 7. Official Google Blog: Things you love are Made with Code
• 8. Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem – NYTimes.com
• 9. The ‘T’ In STEM: Getting More U.S. Students To Gravitate To Computer Science Programs
• 10. The Top 5 Sexiest Female Programmers in the World | The Crazy Programmer
• 11. Programmer privilege: As an Asian male computer science major, everyone gave me the benefit of the doubt.
• 12. Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding : Planet Money : NPR
• 13. When Women Stopped Coding : Planet Money : NPR
• 14. Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You? — Matter — Medium
• 15. Not All Nerds – The New Inquiry
• 16. Barbie book ‘I Can Be a Computer Engineer’ ‘misogynistic’ plot sparks outrage | Daily Mail Online
• 17. The Internet has the perfect response to Barbie’s failed computer engineering book – Salon.com
• 18. Sexist Barbie Book “I Can Be A Computer Engineer” Pulled Off Amazon | TechCrunch

l. hot/ demand/ bubble

• 1. ‘Flappy Bird’ Creator Dong Nguyen Pulled Game Because It Was ‘Too Addictive’ – WSJ.com
• 2. The Flappy Bird of Paradise | Marty Kaplan
• 3. Addiction & Fame: How Flappy Bird is the App Store’s Grunge Moment – The Daily Beast
• 4. ANYBODY CAN LEARN — The Hour of Code reaches 10 million students
• 5. Computer science enrollments rocketed last year, up 22% – Network World
• 6. CS50 Logs Record-Breaking Enrollment Numbers | News | The Harvard Crimson
• 7. CS50, a computer science course, breaks stereotypes and fills halls at Harvard – Business – The Boston Globe
• 8. Fewer Students Are Majoring In Computer Science, Education And English
• 9. For half, STEM degrees lead to other jobs – Computerworld
• 10. How To Code Like A Startup – ReadWrite
• 11. IDC: Hobbyist programmers on the rise | ITworld
• 12. One million students have taken the computer science pledge on Code.org | VentureBeat | Dev | by J. O’Dell
• 13. UPDATE: Hour of Code draws more than 10 million students | Brier Dudley’s blog | Seattle Times
• 14. Software Engineers Will Work One Day for English Majors – Bloomberg View
• 15. Tsunami or Sea Change? Responding to the Explosion of Student Interest in Computer Science

m. market

• 1. It’s Better To Be A Software Programmer Than A Doctor In 2014 | Business Insider
• 2. McKinsey: The $33 Trillion Technology Payoff – NYTimes.com
• 3. Money Is Pouring Into Tech Like It’s 1999—And That’s Not Good | WIRED
• 4. Silicon Valley talent wars: Engineers, come get your $250K salary – CNET
• 5. Tech boom! The war for top developer talent | Application Development – InfoWorld
• 6. The Programmer’s Price
• 7. Backlash stirs in US against foreign worker H-1B visas – San Jose Mercury News
• 8. Facebook flexes political muscle with carve-out in immigration bill – The Washington Post
• 9. Computer Manpower — Is There a Crisis?
• 10. The IT Talent Shortage Debate – InformationWeek
• 11. Be A Software Programmer, Not A Doctor – Business Insider
• 12. The STEM Crisis Is a Myth – IEEE Spectrum
• 13. What’s wrong with Britain’s computer scientists? • The Register

n. languages

• 1. 5 Programming Languages Marked for Death – Dice News
• 2. 50 years of BASIC: Celebrating the programming language’s long, eventful life
• 3. A Comparative Study of Programming Languages in Rosetta Code / Nanz, Furia
• 4. codebases / millions of lines of code
• 5. Facebook Introduces ‘Hack,’ the Programming Language of the Future | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 6. Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal | TIME.com
• 7. Five Best Programming Languages for First-Time Learners
• 8. GitHub language trends and the fragmenting landscape – Donnie Berkholz’s Story of Data
• 9. Hack: a new programming language for HHVM | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code | Facebook
• 10. Interactive: The Top Programming Languages – IEEE Spectrum
• 11. More evidence that Python is the best starter programming language | ITworld
• 12. Oracle hasn’t killed Java — but there’s still time | Application Development – InfoWorld
• 13. Out in the Open: Man Creates One Programming Language to Rule Them All | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 14. Programming, Motherfucker – Do you speak it?
• 15. Python bumps off Java as top learning language | ITworld
• 16. Python is now the most popular introductory teaching language at top U.S. universities | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM
• 17. Rosetta Code Analysis
• 18. Tech Time Warp of the Week: A Celebration of Lady Java, a Coding Language to Rule Them All | Enterprise | WIRED
• 19. The Comparative Productivity of Programming Languages | Dr Dobb’s
• 20. The Next Big Programming Language You’ve Never Heard Of | Enterprise | WIRED
• 21. The rise and rise of JavaScript
• 22. Top 10 Programming Languages – IEEE Spectrum
• 23. When BASIC Was Young: Great Memories – InformationWeek
• 24. Why Apple’s Swift Language Will Instantly Remake Computer Programming | Enterprise | WIRED
• 25. Why Coders Are Going Nuts Over Apple’s New Programming Language | Enterprise | WIRED
• 26. A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github

o. celeb/ leaders

• 1. ‘Geek Sublime,’ by Vikram Chandra – NYTimes.com
• 2. Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra Review: Is Coding Art? | New Republic
• 3. Vikram Chandra Is A Novelist Who’s Obsessed With Writing Computer Code – The Daily Beast
• 4. America’s Tech Guru Steps Down—But He’s Not Done Rebooting the Government | Enterprise | WIRED
• 5. How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch
• 6. Lyndsey Scott is Victoria’s Secret model by day, computer programmer by night | Mail Online
• 7. Obama’s custom Blackberry is stripped down so he can’t have much fun | Mail Online
• 8. President promotes the “Hour of Code” Learning Event | TIME.com
• 9. Tech Time Warp of the Week: Watch Alan Greenspan Hawk Apples Computers For Steve Jobs | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 10. This Open Source Coder Wants to be a Congressman | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 11. Twenty Questions for Donald Knuth | | InformIT
• 12. Wolfram To Revolutionize Computing & Take on Google With New Language | TechFaster
• 13. Walter Isaacson’s ‘The Innovators’: How a Gaggle of Geeks Invented the Future – The Daily Beast
• 14. Gift From Ballmer Will Expand Computer Science Faculty at Harvard – NYTimes.com
• 15. Coders in Congress are still a rare breed | ITworld

p. zuckerberg/ facebook

• 1. Mark Zuckerberg ‘motivated’ Facebook staff walking around with samurai sword | Mail Online
• 2. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal challenge for 2012: Code every day | ZDNet
• 3. He Wanted A Job; Facebook Said No — In A $3 Billion Mistake – Forbes
• 4. Mark Zuckerberg reveals he found The Social Network ‘hurtful’ and tried to ‘block it out’ | Daily Mail Online
• 5. Mark Zuckerberg makes fashion faux pas with navy tuxedo at black tie event | Daily Mail Online
• 6. Facebook stock-surge earns Mark Zuckerberg $1.6bn in one day | Mail Online

q. awards

• 1. January 21, 2014: People of ACM: Daniel Spielman — Association for Computing Machinery
• 2. ACM Turing Award Goes to Pioneer Who Advanced Reliability and Consistency of Computing Systems | News | Communications of the ACM
• 3. Leslie Lamport – A.M. Turing Award Winner
• 4. Leslie Lamport Receives Turing Award – Microsoft Research
• 5. Linus Torvalds Receives IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
• 6. Superclass: 14 of the world’s best living programmers | ITworld
• 7. “Code Stars” – Short Film – YouTube
• 8. Google Lifts the Turing Award Into Nobel Territory – NYTimes.com

r. competition/ community/ sites

• 1. Challenges for coders
• 2. Code for America
• 3. www.codechef.com
• 4. Codebabes: Hot or Not? HNN#24 – YouTube
• 5. CodeBabes: The More Code You Learn, The Less The Instructors Wear | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
• 6. codebabes.com | Learn Coding and Web Development the Fun Way
• 7. United States of America Computing Olympiad – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• 8. HSCTF – The First CTF By High Schoolers For High Schoolers.
• 9. “Beauty of Programming”—delighting in the art of coding – Microsoft Research Connections Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs

s. fun/ entertainment/ humor

• 1. Angry Birds VR? The best April Fool’s pranks in tech
• 2. popularity contest – So obviously, P = NP – Programming Puzzles & Code Golf Stack Exchange
• 3. Silicon Valley | Homepage | HBO
• 4. The Software Inferno – ACM Queue
• 5. The truth behind Open Source apps | CommitStrip – Blog relating the daily life of web agencies developers
• 6. The best April Fool’s pranks of 2014
• 7. What are Stack Overflow unicoins? – Meta Stack Overflow
• 8. Is Angry Birds deterministic? – Arqade
• 9. Is Minecraft Turing-Complete? – Arqade
• 10. LittleBigPlanet : Little Big Computer
• 11. Sergio Guzman – Google+ – Top 20 replies by programmers.. #ComputerWorld
• 12. Google Maps Is Taken Over By Pokémon In April Fools’ Prank
• 13. JavaZone 2014

t. quality/ design

• 1. Debugging file corruption on iOS | Engineering Blog | Facebook Code | Facebook
• 2. How I Narrowed Down The Location Of Malaysia Air Using “Monte Carlo” Data Models ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community
• 3. Just Let Me Code! | Dr Dobb’s
• 4. Programming Laws and Reality: Do We Know What We Think We Know? | Dr Dobb’s
• 5. The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code – Joel on Software
• 6. The malware of the future may come bearing real gifts
• 7. The Universe Is Programmable. We Need an API for Everything | Enterprise | WIRED
• 8. What It’s Like to Design Something Used by a Billion People | Wired Business | Wired.com
• 9. Why software builds fail | ITworld
• 10. With Regulation Looming, It’s Time for Industry to Raise the Bar for Software Quality | Innovation Insights | WIRED
• 11. Algorithms Are Great and All, But They Can Also Ruin Lives | WIRED
• 12. Can An Algorithm Be Creative? | Luke Dormehl
• 13. Doctors Find Barriers to Sharing Digital Medical Records – NYTimes.com
• 14. Facebook Sleuths Unearth a ’70s-Era Bug That Was Crashing Their App | Enterprise | WIRED
• 15. Obama’s Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov – TIME
• 16. Open SSL developer confesses to causing Heartbleed bug | Mail Online
• 17. Social Security spent $300M on ‘IT boondoggle’
• 18. Top websites crash as web ‘starts to run out of space’: Fears major technical problems could become regular occurrence | Mail Online
• 19. What Oracle’s Botched Obamacare Site Says About the Future of the Web | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
• 20. Why the Heyday of Credit Card Fraud Is Almost Over | WIRED

u. history

• 1. » Weird But True! Netflix, Skype, Kindle Predicted in 1965 Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!
• 2. 50 ways that MIT has transformed computer science: the countdown to our MAC50 celebration! (May 28-29) | MIT CSAIL
• 3. BBC News – Bletchley Park: No longer the world’s best kept secret
• 4. Daniel Tzvetkoff’s story as the man who ‘built’ online poker in America | Mail Online
• 5. MIT Celebrates 50 Years of Project MAC, Multics | BetaBoston
• 6. Early Apple Computer Sells For Almost $1 Million At Auction
• 7. BBC News – Are ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ now positive terms?
• 8. The Surprising Complexity of Old-School Calculators | WIRED
• 9. The Man Who Made the UK Say “I’m Sorry For What We Did To Turing.” — Backchannel — Medium
• 10. How did the Enigma machine work? | Technology | The Guardian