Start 'em young

As Eleanor Barkhorn reports, the time to get more women in computer science (any STEM field, for that matter), is when girls are in middle school and high school. The low participation rate in the AP computer science test by women high schoolers is shocking: in some rural states, in the past year, no girls took the exam.

Barbara Ericson, of Georgia Tech's Institute for Computing Education, is working to change that. Ericson and her colleagues, in partnership with the Girl Scouts and other organizations, are experimenting with new strategies to get young women interested in computing. One radical idea: allowing high school students to use CS courses to count toward math or science curriculum requirements.

As much as I think everyone should have a solid grounding in logic (usually introduced by proving theorems in geometry) and problem solving by manipulating equations (algebra, Nicholson Baker's bugbear), I'm inclined to support this idea. Designing, coding, and debugging a program in a procedural language calls for similar skills: working at multiple levels of abstraction, systematically eliminating explanations until the correct one is found, finding the simplest solution.

New suit, new underlayers

Reed Emmons provides some technical details behind the New York Times's recent redesign.

Fail better

As product owner Patrick Cooper explains in an unusually frank post, our launch a couple of weeks ago was actually our second try.

So, it’s healthy every once in while to have an out-and-out fail.

The code deployment was never an issue; the procedural code was solid, and it always built and deployed successfully to production and staging environments. What burned us was the database migration: the new release entailed a major refactoring of an important subset of the schema.

The root cause of the fail was a database version incompatibility that we should have prepared for, but didn't. Even so, there were steps we could have taken that would have told us the migration was in trouble an hour or two sooner.

The migration was a series of SQL scripts. For most small updates (the app is usually updated on a 2-week scrum cycle), the dev team drops one or two short scripts (to create a new table, add some codes to to a dictionary table, that sort of thing) into a canonically-named folder, and migration is a short 5-minute process that takes no more time than the code deployment. But in this case, we had haphazardly put together a series of about a dozen scripts, two of which ran resource-devouring stored procedures.

What I would have done, in hindsight: organize the scripts so that all of the DML is executed first, then the dictionary tables are populated, and then finally the heavy lifting of moving data from one table to another happens. Add monitoring steps so that we can track the progress of the migration (we did do this for the second try). Seriously rethink the choice of stored procedures, and instead use a scripting language like Perl or Python or a compiled program. To the extent possible, provide a log or audit trail of migrated entities (the team did this very successfully in a smaller-scale migration a couple of years ago).

Better storming

It is rare that I am invigorated by someone suggesting brainstorming as a means to solve a problem. (There is something worse, of course, and that's sitting around maundering about something and claiming that you're brainstorming.) Chauncey Wilson recommends a better way to use group collaboration to come up with quality ideas: brainwriting. As Wilson notes, brainwriting can even work when the group is geographically dispersed.

Perfect project, part two

Along with the nifty new features for the public-facing web site, ably explained by Patrick Cooper, last week we also pushed out a major update to the database schema that represents stories and their audio, along with their relationships to programs and their individual episodes. In radio-speak, the ordered segments of a broadcast are called the rundown, and the remodeling of how a rundown is stored was at the core of this past project. We can now handle rebroadcasts for shows like TED Radio Hour (like here, here, and here) without behind-the-curtain hackery.

We also caught up on MySQL versions, and enabled limited concurrent editing of stories by multiple editors.

This was the biggest effort since the massive redesign of 2009, and I am proud to have been a part of it.