Christalee Bieber - Teal Labs, Inc.

What is the sound of one gem shining?

Christalee Bieber — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

These past couple of weeks I've been learning Ruby, a language with a design philosophy similar to Python: high-level code that's easy to read and write. I started with the classic beginner's text, Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, a gonzo adventure through the language, but tapped out partway through Chapter …

immersing myself in a sea of data

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Another area in which I wanted to improve my understanding was system design, as I kept flubbing interviews on that topic. I considered jumping straight into Alex Xu's System Design Interview (vol. 1 or 2) but was convinced to instead tackle a classic text, Martin Kleppman's Designing Data-Intensive Applications. Published …

who engineers a browser?

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

After my attempt to write a digital breadboard, I turned back to job hunting for a while. But that quickly paled and I looked around for a project that would keep my fingers typing and my commits flowing. I stumbled across a group of folks at RC working their way …

building a digital breadboard

Christalee Bieber — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Earlier this year I was laid off from my job. As I wandered through a morass of job listings and LeetCode, I wanted to write something that demonstrated my React skills more extensively than my rc-niceties portfolio project. I also wanted an excuse to try out Typescript, as I had …

deploying with github actions

Christalee Bieber — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Last week I updated my blog for the first time in a long time - so long that I had forgotten exactly how to run and build it. (pelican -rl content is the right answer for my current directory structure.) Once I figured that out, I wrote my post and figured …

the joy of react

Christalee Bieber — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

I've recently started some PD at work with The Joy of React, a course by React maven Josh Comeau. It promises to teach me not just the basics but also some "happy practices" (hedging on "best practices") that I'm expected to bring back to my daily practice. Several of my …

rc-niceties

Christalee Bieber — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 00:00:00 -0400

A frequent comment about the Recurse Center is "everyone here is so nice!" Perhaps due to careful admissions, or the social rules, RC participants strive to keep it a supportive community where people are open to others: working together, communicating carefully, and respecting each other. One mechanism for building the …

Outreachy

Christalee Bieber — Sun, 04 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Last month I applied to Outreachy, a paid internship for non-students from underrepresented groups in technology. Instead of interviewing based on your resume, part of the application involves making a contribution to the open source project you're hoping to work for. Since the internship employers tend to be big names …

syntax highlighting & feeds

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I haven't written much about the process of putting this blog together because I want it to speak for itself, but I wanted to write a short note about two features I added today. One was syntax highlighting, using pygment's 'friendly' theme. (Thanks to this gallery for showing off the …

PageRanking RC Zulip

Christalee Bieber — Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Over the past couple of weeks, I and some colleagues in the Mastering Large Datasets with Python group have been practicing our new ability to scrape and process large amount of data with Spark, by harvesting public messages from the RC Zulip and analyzing them. (For those unfamiliar with Zulip …

Puzzling Goings-On

Christalee Bieber — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Today, an RC colleague organized a group to tackle a git mystery, in which murder has been done and the clues are hidden in commit messages. My group did not solve the crime within the hour, nor did we limit ourselves to git commands. But we appreciated the spirit of …

Cost of Drinking

Christalee Bieber — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

When I started at the Recurse Center, I had several vague ideas of projects I wanted to work on. A throwaway comment on the price of beer in Budapest inspired me to see if beer could be used as a cost of living metric. The first maps I found polled …

Three Things Learned

Christalee Bieber — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I haven't been keeping up with this blog, but I have been keeping busy. A few things I've learned recently:

Although JavaScript has a typeof command, it doesn't produce very useful output. In particular, it yields object no matter whether the structure in question is a Map, an Array, a …

refactoring checklist; ML project ideas

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

In a recent conversation I mentioned that when I meet a new Python feature, I add it to my refactoring checklist. Someone asked me to share that checklist, and here it is, slightly expanded:

write all comments/docstrings
resolve all TODOs
add types to all fn declarations and key local …

RC Week 1

Christalee Bieber — Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

My first week at the Recurse Center has been a bit of a firehose, mostly socially. It wasn't until Friday that I found myself with more than an hour of unbroken coding time, between orientation activities, chats/pairing with fellow RCers, presentations and craft evening and feelings check-in and more …

RC Day 1!

Christalee Bieber — Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0500

I've set a goal to reflect on each day at the Recurse Center; not all those reflections will be public, but those related to what I'm working on will be. The day started a bit earlier than I've been used to, and I enjoyed the orientation activities for the most …

sorting and planning

Christalee Bieber — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0500

This week, I've been gearing up for my batch at the Recurse Center, prompted by a flurry of facilitator emails. I've joined Zulip and indicated my interest in a reading/project group for Mastering Large Datasets with Python; posted my introduction to the Welcome thread and read about who else …

Advent of Code 2020, in JavaScript

Christalee Bieber — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0500

I’m doing Advent of Code this year using JavaScript, with the goal of forcing myself to learn the ins and outs of the language. And boy, does it have a lot of those. Here are some reflections on traps and quirks I’ve discovered.

Initially I wrote JS literally …

Denim Duvet

Christalee Bieber — Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Over the years, I've gone through a lot of jeans. Usually I retire them for excessive rips and holes, although my standards have risen steadily. During the 2020 winter holiday, my partner and I decided to make significant progress on turning this pile of jeans into a duvet cover. This …

Recurse Center, incoming!

Christalee Bieber — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 00:00:00 -0500

I'm honored and excited to join the January 2021 batch of the Recurse Center, a unique community of programmers focused on self-directed learning. Although their Brooklyn space is closed for the foreseeable future, they've put an impressive amount of effort into facilitating productivity and communication with Virtual RC, leaning heavily …

my first pull request

Christalee Bieber — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Someone linked me to Compute Cuter, a set of suggestions for cuter text editor themes, fonts, even keyboards and keycaps. The site is by sailorhg, who makes the fairyfloss theme I sometimes use. Looking through the suggestions, I was rather taken with the Witch Hazel theme, but it didn't have …

Embroidery

Christalee Bieber — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0400

As a child, I learned to cross-stitch. As an adult, I've returned to it as a relatively quiet, clean, soothing hobby I can pick up at idle moments that nevertheless produces something lasting and beautiful. Projects I've been working on include:

A rendering of one of Frank Lloyd Wright's windows …

Family Cookbook

Christalee Bieber — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0500

My extended family likes to cook, especially at the holidays, and frequently I hear, “What’s the recipe for X? Ask Y, they’ll know.” And then the recipe will be dredged up from memory, or a dusty cookbook, or someone’s text history, or photos of a dusty cookbook …

High Holy Days Music

Christalee Bieber — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 00:00:00 -0400

I sing with the Brooklyn Community Chorus and we sometimes hold our concerts at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope. In return, CBE invites us to provide backup vocals during their High Holy Days services. I participated in 2019 and was pleased to receive a binder full of music, some …

Buffer the Slayer

Christalee Bieber — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0400

When I was teaching programming at the Workshop School, I eventually expected my students to learn about object-oriented programming (OOP). As it’s not a paradigm I use frequently, I wanted to refresh my memory, both about OOP and about how to teach it. So I dug up a project …

Cat Assistant

Christalee Bieber — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Inspired by the hilarious interview question, "What words would your family use to describe you?"

A Tale of 2 PDs

Christalee Bieber — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Recently I attended two professional development events nominally aimed at "maker educators." They ended up being pretty different experiences, though!

Introduction to Programming

Christalee Bieber — Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Colleagues often consult me for advice on teaching programming as fledgling or non-programmers. Here are capsule reviews of various tools and approaches for beginners.

CTE Programming in 2017

Christalee Bieber — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Anyone teaching computer-related topics in 2017 knows that: the range of skills, compensation levels, and working conditions in "tech" is huge and unpredictable; and, trying to future-proof your students is impossible.

Teaching Materials Selection in High School

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 13 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Materials selection and Ashby charts are rarely covered in depth for most STEM students or teachers, so I wanted to give them strong guidance. Here's my advice.

Advent of Code

Christalee Bieber — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 -0500

Advent of Code is an annual challenge during the month of December, posing short puzzles that generally require code to solve. Although I've never seriously competed, I have completed for my own enjoyment every puzzle from 2016, and nearly every one from 2015. The solutions from 2016 are annotated for …

Berrybasket

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

In 2013 my partner Daniel and I were teaching at The Hacktory, a Philadelphia makerspace, mostly about circuits. A friend approached us about teaming up with an elementary science teacher for a unit on datalogging in (cardboard) houses, since Daniel's former job involved datalogging in (real) houses. The students were …

The Hacktory

Christalee Bieber — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 -0400

When I moved to Philadelphia, I got involved in a local makerspace, The Hacktory. They provided a great platform for teaching others and tinkering on my own projects. Here are a few of the activities I worked on there.

MIT OCW Highlights

Christalee Bieber — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

You never forget your first, and for me, it's true for my first job: working with faculty to publish open educational content at MIT OpenCourseWare. A massive undertaking, OCW's original remit was to publish the entirety of MIT's curriculum online under an open license, for reuse and remixing. I was …

Cider Press

Christalee Bieber — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Once upon a time, my friends and I went apple-picking, and decided we wanted to make some hard cider. So we got in touch with a friend of a friend who had a working cider press, drove out to the coast, and pressed some apples. This was great fun, but …