Anyone on Twitter has had quite a week, watching Musk’s chaos slowly reveal what has always been obvious: the site is nothing without people. People tweeting, of course, but also people building and maintaining the platform, people paying attention to what people tweet, people in the press holding tightly on…

When I was a child, my dreams were small: I wished my parents would stop hating each other, I wished we didn’t have to keep moving, I wished we could eat Taco Bell instead canned soup. As I aged, these dreams grew, and I began to wish for independence, for…

About three months ago I started my 2022–23 sabbatical. At the time, I framed my goals around three things: Slowing my communication (e.g., reducing email to once a week, getting off social media, writing fewer blog posts). Rebuilding community (especially face to face). Quietly making (a new creative coding platform…

I listened to the last episode of the School Colors podcast today. Epic in scope, it chronicles the intersections between race, power, and education Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and the many different ways that its communities have fought for their children, neighborhoods, and ideals. …

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…