All Crunchzilla tutorials now open source

All the code is now available for all the Crunchzilla coding tutorials.

Code Monster, Code Maven, and Game Maven from Crunchzilla have been used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world to experiment with learning to write computer programs.

There have been many requests to make them and available in languages other than English.

By open sourcing the Crunchzilla tutorials, I hope three things might happen:

Translations: I hope others are able to take the content and translate part or all of it into languages other than English for use in more classrooms around the world.

New lessons: New tutorials might teach programming games, working through puzzles or math problems, or perhaps a more traditional computer science curriculum aligned with a particular lesson plan.

Entirely new tutorials: Some of the ideas and techniques -- including the step-by-step learn-by-doing style, live code, informative error messages, and avoiding infinite loops in students' code -- might be useful for others.

The code was designed to be all static, so you can easily create your own version just by editing the files and then putting all the files together on your own server. There is a single JSON file that contains all the lesson content.

If you use the code for anything that helps children learn, I'd love to hear about it (please e-mail me at greg@crunchzilla.com).

Quick links

A carefully picked list of some of the tech news I enjoyed recently:

• So, you know that prototype we showed you? Turns out AI in real world conditions is hard. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Artificial intelligence expert Yann LeCun says, "There have been, on the face of it, impressive demonstrations, [but] those are not as impressive as they look ... They don't have common sense ... One of the things we really want to do is get machines to acquire the very large number of facts that represent the constraints of the real world just by observing it through video or other channels. That’s what would allow them to acquire common sense, in the end." ([1])
  
  
• Genetic algorithms and neural networks are back. It feels like the 1990s all over again. ([1])
  
  
• Bringing more novices to AI now is the way to get more experts and advances later ([1])
  
  
• Nice results from focusing on errors that matter to people, the perceived quality of the system by humans, not theoretical accuracy ([1] [2])
  
  
• Success often comes from trying many things: "Start ... with a hazy intuition or vision ... After a lot of trial and error they get closer and closer to discovering what their idea is ... Seeking novelty instead of objectives is risky — not every interesting thread will pay off — but ... the potential payoffs are higher." ([1])
  
  
• Research includes people able to do things no one else can, including having data or compute at the frontier beyond what anyone else has done before ([1] [2])
  
  
• 6.3M virtual reality headsets sold in 2016, but almost all so far just the cheap toys where you slot your smartphone in to use as the screen ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Total [tablet] sales sinking 15.6%, year on year, with sales of 174.8M units in 2016 compared to 2015's 207.2M" ([1])
  
  
• For the first time, more people in the US using Netflix than a DVR: "54 percent of US adults reporting they have Netflix in their households compared to the 53 percent of US adults that have DVR" ([1])
  
  
• The Economist: "Amazon’s heady valuation resembles a self-fulfilling prophecy. The company will be able to keep spending, and its spending will keep making it more powerful" ([1])
  
  
• "What has surprised AWS as the cloud has evolved ... I don’t think in our wildest dreams we ever thought we’d have a six- to seven-year head start" ([1])
  
  
• ... and that is true in retail for Amazon as well ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "Yahoo is perhaps most famous for destroying all of its best social properties. From its hideous deformations of Flickr and neglect of Upcoming to its starvation of Delicious and torment of GeoCities users, the company excelled at buying great things and turning them into unusable parodies of themselves. Execs seemed to profoundly misunderstand why people used the sites they bought." ([1])
  
  
• "Google will account for 78 percent of search ad revenue in 2017, while Facebook will get 39 percent of display ad revenue. Everyone else ... is fighting over the scraps." ([1])
  
  
• Culture is created by what you publicly reward, not what you say ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• "The problem with bad processes is that they institutionalize inefficiency. They ensure that things will be done the wrong way, over and over and over again" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "Burnout begins when a worker feels overwhelmed for a sustained period of time, then apathetic and ultimately numb .... Workers who used to take the lead on projects grow taciturn during meetings. Top performers start coming in late, leaving early and watch their careers stall ... Burnout is claiming victims at work, and companies aren’t ready to cope" ([1])
  
  
• A lot of companies have merely medium data, not big data: "Hundreds of enterprises were hugely disappointed by their useless 2 to 10TB Hadoop clusters ... Their data works better in other technologies" ([1])
  
  
• Lack of incentives leads to poor Internet of Things security ([1])
  
  
• As Javascript ages, it repeats many of the problems of the past: "Using data from over 133K websites, we show that 37% of them include at least one library with a known vulnerability" ([1])
  
  
• "What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming?" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Many Xkcd comics are both funny and prescient, and this one on encryption seems particularly relevant right now ([1])
  
  
• Xkcd comic on friends that have an Amazon Echo ([1])
  
  
• SMBC comic on "existential sort". Don't miss the hovertext: "Also, any list can be immediately sorted by just pretty much being fine with it the way it is." ([1])

Book review: Radical Candor

This just came out, the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott. It's a good read on managing and focused on people. I'd recommend it if you are a manager or help others manage people.

I'd summarize it by saying it takes a teaching and mentoring approach to management, very much of the school that managers primarily exist to help the people on their team. The advice is both practical and actionable, with specific advice for running 1:1s and meetings, and focused how to encourage conversations where people strive to improve themselves as well as helping others.

Some carefully selected quotes from the book:

"It seems obvious that good bosses must care personally about the people who report directly to them ... And yet ... "

"It turns out that when people trust you and believe you care about them, they are much more likely to accept and act on your praise and criticism, tell you what they really think about what you are doing well and, more importantly, not doing so well, engage in this same behavior with one another ... embrace their role on the team, and focus on getting results"

"When you're the boss, it's awkward to ask your direct reports to tell you frankly what they think of your performance, even more awkward for them than it is for you. To help, I [ask] ... 'Is there anything I could do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?' ... It is essential that you ... commit to sticking with the conversation until you have a genuine response. One technique is to count to six before saying anything else, forcing them to endure the silence. The goal is not to bully but to insist on a candid discussion ... Then listen with the intent to understand ... Once you've asked your question and embraced the discomfort and understood the criticism, you have to follow up by showing that you welcome it. You have to reward the candor if you want to get more of it ... Make a chance as soon as possible ... show you're trying."

"If you can absorb the blows, the members of your team are more likely to be good bosses to their employees when they have them ... The rewards of watching people you care about flourish and then help others flourish."

"The ultimate goal of Radical Candor is to achieve results collaboratively that you could never achieve individually ... A culture of guidance ... An exemplary team ... self-correcting quality whereby most problems are solved before you are even aware of them ... Don't start by bossing people. They'll just hate you. Start by listening to them."