What follows is a list of excuses as to why I have posted zero blogs this semester.
1. Sorry, I was in Philly!!
Here’s the blog post I tried to start writing the day I left Philadelphia:
I’m currently surrounded by half-filled water bottles, power cords, notebooks, stickers from tech companies, and sleeping bodies curled up on top of and huddled underneath tables. This carnage is the remains of PennApps, a 40-hour, 1000 student hackathon organized biannually by students from the University of Pennsylvania.
As I was running on ~6 hours of sleep in a 55 hour period, I was quite out of it and may have spent some time staring at my computer and drooling before deciding to bag the rest of that post and take a nap.
2. Sorry, I was in San Francisco!!
I guess I just really like not sleeping on school weekends, ‘cause I went to another hackathon in San Francisco, sponsored by SignalFire and Readyforce. It was also super fun, I met lots of cool people involved in the startup scene down there, built a ping-pong app because every single startup has a ping pong table and, as my friend Brendan tweeted,
Ping pong score tracker: a way to finally tell your boss how unproductive you truly are
— Brendan Conron (@BrendanTech) September 15, 2013
3. Sorry, I was TA-ing CS classes!!
This semester, one of our professors is trying out a new curriculum for an introductory CS course and it’s very new and exciting. As a part of his course staff, I’m spending lots of time holding office hours and doing labs, while simultaneously getting to know the curriculum myself. It’s exciting to be a part of something so new in the department, but it’s also exciting to be part of long-standing legacies like the traditional introduction to CS course, in which I’m also a teaching assistant for labs.
I just like hanging out with baby CS majors.
4. Sorry, I was doing watercolors on the Pres Lawn!!
Did I mention I’m taking watercolors? Did I mention I’m doing it outside? During the most beautiful days of the fall? For six hours a week?
These are not my watercolors. Check out Nita Leger Casey for more of this work.
I like this class.