I like this take. Copilot to me seems a glorified (very intelligent) auto-search-paste/autocomplete service. It is just mimicing what usual devs do which is to copy-paste code from StackOverflow/github for many mundane types of codes like for loops, mongo find queries, callback func definitions etc for JS devs for eg.
The idea of auto-attribution if copilot surfaces licensed code is best because then it keeps the copilot user honest where the code is coming from and honor the original license.
> It is just mimicing what usual devs do which is to copy-paste code from StackOverflow/github for many mundane types of codes like for loops, mongo find queries, callback func definitions etc for JS devs for eg.
I’m genuinely disturbed to see how many people in this thread think that casual plagiarism is the norm for “usual devs”.
Again, I get the argument, just think it’s overstated. First, when referring to stack overflow and blogs, generally, that’s intentionally shared with the express purpose of people copying it- hopefully while learning from it at the same time. Second, again with some code bits it’s not really plagiarism any more than all iambic pentameter is plagiarizing Shakespeare.
Devs often look at code to see basic syntax, understand algorithms, etc. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. One should draw a line somewhere, but to say I need to attribute […somevar] every time I use it because I happened to see it one time on a blog post is silly.
A thought experiment may help: Scrape Github for all unique strings longer than X and store in a file with a timestamp and owner. How large does X have to be before attribution is required? If not length, then how do you determine whether attribution is required?
I would find it very difficult to recommend this book - I think parts of it are simply factually mistaken, unfortunately, and I worry someone using knowledge from it would make themselves look like more of an imposter, not less.
Not sure how old your students are but I'm teaching my 8 year old daughter programming (just been few days). I started exactly by telling "when you tell the computer to do something, it will do it." But instead of showing her any piece of code or explaining variables etc programming concepts I showed her how to command computer by writing simple 1 step commands like clear, date and echo in a terminal.
After she saw how she was asking computer to clear a screen of terminal, asking computer to tell current date or simply echoing what she typed, I moved to scratch programming editor https://scratch.mit.edu/
With scratch, I showed her how to tell computer to move an image to the right and left with single "move 10 step" and "moved -10 steps" command (still on single commands to computer to do what she want)
Then I showed her how to ask computer to do something repeatedly by introducing "repeat" block (it helped that I asked her to physically imitate a pony moving on screen by few steps to right and left). And by using "repeat" block she learned to make onscreen pony dance. By this time she understood how to piece together multiple commands together and loop concept, X-Y axis as I also showed her on computer she can move a subject in 4 directions by manipulating X-Y axis values)
Next she wanted to spin the onscreen pony so I introduced her the concept of direction and the whole degrees measurement. After that it was pretty simple for her to grok that by turning 1 unit clockwise and then doing it on "repeat" made the pony spin.
During the whole process I didn't type a thing. I let her drive the whole thing by clicking/adding/removing and making mistakes to learn. It has been great fun and she already has tons of ideas about what she want to try and make computer do it for her.
That's pretty neat UI. My #1 complaint with using trello for quick task list is inability to grab a photo and attaching to the card. I think it is much faster to achieve than writing it down. Especially given I live in foreign country and it is much easier to show a photo of an item to local vendors than trying to recall how to pronounce the name of it.
We see where you're coming from, and we couldn't emphasize more on how important it is to be able to instantly turn something into text or images and attach them to a task (or card in Trello's case).
It's like what people say, "A photo is worth 1000 words."
I don't know if it was most effective because it was the only thing I tried and it worked beautifully. Earlier this year there was Cricket World Cup and most of the world cup schedules I checked were in the form of a long table, nothing interactive. It was a pain to find matches happening on particular day/team/venue in one glance.
So me and another friend set out to create a schedule viewer that will give us match info within 1~2 secs and wrote a simple but interactive schedule viewer[1] with AngularJS over a weekend. We posted it to r/cricket subreddit but didn't get more than couple hundred views. I also tried tweeting other former cricketers,cricket writers but my tweet got buried in no time because these people had fans ranging from 100k to 2mil.
Then I noticed espencricinfo.com website had a twitter section that listed tweets from all these prominent cricket figures in real-time as they were tweeted.
So during the match when everybody was watching and tweeting, I started tweeting these folks link to our interactive dashboard. This increased chance of them seeing my tweet and we got RTs from a lot of them this way. Of course for that our dashboard had to be the best out there and it was (it worked on mobile browser too).
With just few tweet to celebrity cricketers/sports writers we went from hundreds to over 30k page view and 7k recurring viewers over the course of world cup. The key I think was to get noticed when they were most active and also have a nice app/content to convince them to RT.
Quite amazing that was overlooked in CMS the first place.
Kudos for pushing it during the match.
I've also seen that in the middle of an event people often get social, especially if it is a bit slower moving (cricket game to military parade) and sociability is a major part of being there in the first place. To talk cricket.
"in the middle of an event people often get social" absolutely. This was the case. A lot of them were tweeting about how the matches were progressing, predicting, analyzing match situations and having good old banter with the opposing team fans :D
Just to make sure I understand correctly: was it the timing during a match that made the difference? Because you knew they were online and able to respond?
Yes, the timing of the match was the key. Because these high profile twitter users were tweeting, it increased the chance of them seeing my tweets to them. Few of them clicked on the link to dashboard and RT'ed it. It then snowballed from there by RTs by their followers.
I used kanbanflow[1] it is trello like project management tool with built-in support of pomodoro [2]. For reporting, it has a pretty basic use case available on free account but should be good enough for your purpose.
You sound like you have a solid background, I'm sure you could easily find a job that pays triple if not more than your current position (or do I just live in a bubble?)
Unfortunately, and you will hear this a lot if you ask, all of the really sweet jobs don't ever make it to job boards, and especially not race-to-the-bottom cesspools like eLance/oDesk/Upstart.
You have to network, and you have to network hard. Not to promote yourself (that's advertising), but to learn what challenges the tech teams at companies need help with today. And when you find a mutually beneficial opportunity, they will be EXTREMELY GRATEFUL if you were to mention your skills and leverage them to solve real business needs.
What those needs are, how your skills apply, and how you approach the situation are entirely up to you and the circumstances you encounter.
Upside: Choose Your Own Adventure
Downside: I can't give you any general advice that would help; it's a skill everyone has to cultivate in their own, I think.
Maybe I'm wrong about the downside. I'd love to find out if I am.
