April 2024 Bakery

Half baked

Some written thoughts, but not enough for their own post

I deleted all my tweets. It took almost four months at a rate of 50 tweets per day, which is the maximum allowed by the free api. While I don't miss twitter as a permanent record of my half baked ideas, I do miss getting to interact with some folks that I admire. Likely Twitter will never be what it was and every time I open the website, I find myself noticing that it is no longer a source of quality content. I may allow myself to start tweeting at people again after I first write a script to automatically delete new tweets after some period of time (maybe a day or a week). I view tweets as ephemeral at this point and I'd like to make reality match this feeling. All that is to say I'm saving all my very normal content for all of you right here.

The California Teachers Association wrote a letter opposing a new bill that could mandate the "science of reading" in schools. I learned about this this news in a recent episode of The Citizen Stewart Show. This is the kind of news that would have driven me insane in an earlier period of my life, but I've changed my mind on teachers unions.

I looked at both the bill and the opposition letter. Here's my take.

1. It would be good to improve reading instruction in schools.
2. The CTA's reason for opposing the bill range from reasonable skepticism of new professional development requirements to unreasonable concern that the bill would be bad for English Language Learners.
3. The bill has no funding provisions and certainly does not increase teacher pay.
4. Googling California teacher pay reveals that it would be very difficult to support a family with a middle class life style in California on a single (or even two) teacher salaries.

I get that we want to improve instruction in schools. I also think that we don't get to ask teachers to do more of anything unless we can ensure that they have salaries that grant them comfortable middle class life styles in the communities they teach.

I wonder if the CTA would still oppose the bill if it both mandated "science of reading" instruction and doubled teacher pay. Obviously changes to instruction should not require a doubling of teacher compensation, but until teachers are compensated reasonably, I don't blame the CTA for dragging its feet.

Quarter baked

A sentence or two and a piece of content.

Good editing tips with examples.

What I think about when I edit — Eva Parish

I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.

Eva ParishEva Parish

Look, it's what I work on!

This is definitely the biggest pain point in Rails for me. It would be very cool to see deploying the "Rails" way. More here.

Never aspire to a more complicated stack than what your application calls for.

We’re moving continuous integration back to developer machines

Between running Rubocop style rules, Brakeman security scans, and model-controller-system tests, it takes our remote BuildKite-based continuous integration setup about 5m30s to verify a code change is ready to ship for HEY. My Intel 14900K-based Linux box can do that in less than half the time (and my M3 Max isn’t that much slower!). S…

Raws

Naked links.

Jesse Spevack on LinkedIn: Alumni Showcase 2403

Earlier this week, I shared a little side project I've been working on - DoMath.io at the Turing School of Software & Design Alumni Showcase. I got some help…

LinkedInJesse Spevack