It’s hard to believe that just one year ago I was co-organizing ICER 2021 (and just two years ago, co-organizing ICER 2020). In many ways, those two years feel like an entirely different era of my life: I spent 98% of my time at home in the exact same room…

I don’t know about you, but I think I go to too many Dagstuhl workshops. This is my third this calendar year, and tenth ever in 20 years of research, which feels egregious (and my wife agrees). But it also makes me feel guilty: there are so many outstanding scholars…

I grew up around teachers — the ones who taught me obviously, but also my mother, who was a 5th grade teacher for several decades, and also several of my aunts and cousins. Talk of school, grading, and summer prep were constants in my home. …

About four years ago, my friend and colleague Thomas LaToza came to me with an observation: we spent a lot of time in CS talking about ways to make programming easier, better, less error prone, more powerful, and even more just, but rarely do we ever try to explain any…

I didn’t grow up wanting to be a professor, or anything really. My vision of my future was a truncated one: I imagined that I’d finish high school, maybe college, and then seek out what I wanted most — independence from family and an escape from near poverty. This seemed…

I know what you’re thinking: the Musk acquisition, the pervasive harassment, or perhaps she’s following Philip Guo and getting off social media. Others still might be thinking of my recent conflict on Twitter, where my sloppy tweet reading and writing led to me being called out and publicly shamed by…

My childhood was full of traumatic events. I was bullied verbally and physically for years. I hid my transness out of fear of rejection, abandonment, and violence. My parents’ divorce thrust me into a position of parental and sibling caregiving early in life, leaving little room for me manage my…

Back when I was a senior undergraduate in 2001, I was sure I wanted to go to graduate school to get a Ph.D. My wonderful mentor Margaret Burnett made a simple pitch — a life of following my curiosity and telling people about everything I learn—and I was sold. But…

Over the past few years, I’ve written and spoken extensively about the need for more critical perspectives in to computing education, to balance out the more utopian, solutionist rhetoric in computing. I wrote a book, I gave talks about programming + politics, requirements and oppression, structural inequities, CS culture, and…