I slacked on doing blog posts for the next week, but I still want to remember what I did each day, so this is me going back after the fact and writing down what I remember before it gets too late. All posts done in this fashion will be denoted by a *.

Today began with studio as there wasn’t a check in. After struggling some more with the d3 version of my circos visualization, Ramsey’s class started. We had a few readings for class, my favorite was the Wat talk which comments on some silly decisions that were made when writing some commonly used programming languages.

In the evening, Amit’s intro happened. It was basically a discussion about his ideas for his time with us and his teaching philosophy. He challenges traditional education and examines how we can better help people understand programming. He talked about how the learning curve for programming is pretty easy at first but then gets really hard, and how most people aren’t taught how to overcome this stage in the curve. Many give up and think they will never be capable. The reality is that it is hard - and that’s okay, but we have to be taught to deal with that. He’ll work with a group of ‘Kitchen Table Coders’ (only those who can fit around his kitchen table) to understand how this education gap can be overcome.