I’ve written about TypeScript in the past for my p5 friendly error fellowship, and at a coworker’s encouragement, I made a series of four YouTube videos, totalling about 12 minutes in length, that attempt to provide a quick survey of what I like most about the tool.

You can view the TypeScript videos here.

My colleague Claire Kearney-Volpe and I have recently been co-teaching HTML and CSS to students who are visually impaired.

One of the benefits of learning coding today is the fact that it can be done without having to install anything: using sites like JS Bin, CodePen, and Mozilla Thimble, people can tinker with code on their web browser, and even publish it instantly online with the click of a button.

Unfortunately, however, these sites are inaccessible to screen reader users.

I’ve recently been helping my colleague Taeyoon Choi with his series of Signing Coders workshops, in which we’ve been teaching students who are hearing-impaired how to code using p5.js.

One of the challenges Taeyoon faced in writing his computer-based learning activities was providing students with a simple, welcoming coding environment in which they could tinker with example p5 sketches without fear, embedded in the context of his curriculum.

A friend and I were recently reminscing about a poignant 2007 game by Jason Rohrer called Passage.

It’s hard to describe the game without spoiling anything, but since it literally takes five minutes to play, I encourage you to play it online right now.

The thing is, until today, you couldn’t play it online.

After watching Bryan Cantrill’s presentation on Running Aground: Debugging Docker in Production I got all excited (and strangely nostalgic) about the possibility of core-dumping server-side Python apps whenever they go awry. This would theoretically allow me to fully inspect the state of the program at the point it exploded, rather than relying solely on the information of a stack trace.

I decided to try exploring a core dump on my own by writing a simple Python script that generated one.

My final project working at the Mozilla Foundation was teach.mozilla.org, which was the first content-based website I’ve helped create in quite some time. During the site’s development, I finally gave myself the time to learn about a practice I’d been procrastinating to learn about for an embarrassingly long time: accessibility.

On December 13, 2013, I sent the following email to several of my friends who play videogames:

Hey, if you're receiving this it's because you're on my Steam friends list. I don't send spam out often but right now I am frustrated with the collective hatred of the internet and this is the only way I can think of fighting back.

Earlier this year, I played a web-based game called Depression Quest. It's not particularly "fun", because it's about depression, but it is very good at building awareness about, and empathy for, a serious mental condition.

The creator happens to be a woman and has been harassed by the internet. The game, while free, is trying to get on Steam and a bunch of internet assholes are down-voting the game because misogyny.

So, if you either like the premise of the game or despise misogyny (or both!), I encourage you to vote for the game on Steam Greenlight using the link below:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=200770535

That is all. Thanks for reading this, and apologies if this is spam to you.

The above email was the only “mass email” I’ve sent in at least the past two years. I was pretty frustrated at the time.

A few years ago, I made a tool called Collusion in an attempt to better understand how websites I’d never even heard of were tracking my adventures across the Internet.

With the upcoming Hour of Code, there’s been a lot of confusion as to the definition of what “coding” is and why it’s useful, and I thought I’d contribute my thoughts.

When will we (finally) become a colorblind society? The pursuit of colorblindness makes people impatient. With courage, we should respond: Hopefully never.

— Michelle Alexander

In her excellent book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander makes an argument that the notion of colorblindness is a deeply flawed principle that has proved catastrophic for African Americans in the post-civil rights era.