Code

Question: If you had limited experience with graphic design software but wanted to do basic stuff for web design, what software would you use? Leave the answers in the comments or email me. As I play around with Vibe coding, I’ve decided to take a new topic each week. For context, look at my Dinostroids: My Journey into Vibe Coding . Or just go play Dinostroids . This week, I’ve been learning how to modify WordPress themes. My website has a complex theme that is impossible to change without getting under the hood. The Foundry website is also excessively complex for what it is, but they both turn out to be great to learn on. ...

Dinostroids , my first vibe-coded software project, is live. The last time I wrote any meaningful amount of production software was in 1990. At the time, I was running a software consulting company with my partner, Dave Jilk. We’d reached the point where, as we grew, he became responsible for all the software, and I handled all the network integration stuff we had to do for our clients. Every now and then, I’d have to do maintenance on something I had written in the past, but it was pretty minimal. ...

littleBits just shipped their newest product – the littleBits Code Kit . If you have a kid, this product is for you (and them). littleBits Code Kit leverages kids love of games to learn to code. It uses Google Blockly which has rapidly become a popular visual editor. My favorite line from a teacher so far is that littleBits Code Kit is “better than recess”, citing a situation where students would rather stay in the classroom and invent with Code Kit instead of going out to recess. ...

Terry Kawaja is brilliant. I give you three minutes of his amazingness. That is all.

On Saturday I went to two films at the Boulder International Film Festival – Code: Debugging the Gender Gap and A Good American . Both were excellent and worth watching, but Code was special for me as its an issue I’ve been helping work on for over a decade. When I joined the National Center for Women & Information Technology board as the chair in 2005, it was a nascent organization and the issue of the small number of women in computer science, while often talked about, wasn’t well understood. Today, not only is the issue well understood, but many of the solutions are clear and being talked openly about, such as in the article At Harvey Mudd College, the Ratio of Women in Computer Science Increased from 10% to 40% in 5 Years ...

The video from the second panel I was on at Google I/O 2010 – Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: A VC panel – is up. Dick Costolo – the COO of Twitter – is the moderator and my fellow panelists are Albert Wenger, Chris Dixon, Dave McClure, and Paul Graham. Someone didn’t like the title so it was renamed “VCs Who Code” but apparently that didn’t stick with the official event panel namers. ...