One of my least-favorite, yet highly-used, apps is AMC Theatre’s app for finding movie show times and purchasing tickets. The app is highly-used because I watch a lot of movies in the summer. It is my least favorite app because it is not well-designed. From my perspective the app should help solve a few basic […]
This past April I attended a gala/fundraiser for Huntington Theatre. It was a great event featuring the cast of A Little Night Music…and an auction…oh that auction. I had joked with another attendee that I intended to win the lot featuring Hamilton tickets. No one was more surprised than me when the guy at the kids table at the very […]
Correction: Motor oil is changed every 3-10K miles, not 15-30K. This is what happens when I trade driving for biking. One of my favorite oxymoronic statements is, “Common sense is not common.” There is even a Wikipedia essay on the concept. I was immediately reminded of the statement after reading a few comments on a […]
Disclaimer: Coursera is a competitor of edX (where I work). My views are my own, not those of edX. Last week Coursera announced they’d be shutting down their old platform, removing some older courses. Hacker News and reddit went crazy and trashed Coursera. Ironically, Coursera made the right choice. They simply did a poor job […]
I’ve been reading various posts on Facebook, reddit, and Medium about MIT’s recent announcement of a moratorium on freshmen in Senior House. The overwhelming majority of what I am reading is dissatisfaction with the MIT administration. Many feel this another step to squash the culture normally associated with east campus. I didn’t spend much time […]
Take a look at your URL bar. See that green lock? That’s about 10 hours of work this weekend, approximately 9 more than planned! Nevertheless, I am happy to share that all of my personally-hosted sites are now served exclusively via SSL thanks to Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a new certificate authority issuing free […]
I had a job interview earlier this evening. It lasted about 20 minutes before I abruptly ended it. This was supposed to be a first round technical interview, conducted via telephone and CoderPad. We go through introductions. I explain my current development and volunteer work and we get to the first question: Given an input value, determine if it […]
Last week MIT announced a new path to earning it’s one-year Supply Chain Management (SCM) master’s degree. Students can take the first semester of courses online at edX, earning a “MicroMaster’s” degree. After successful completion of the micro-master’s degree, students can apply to the full program, complete a semester of residential courses, and earn the […]
This weekend I attended the MIT Alumni Leadership Conference (ALC) where the topic of MOOCs came up. The brief discussion was around the question of what will MIT’s alumni composition look like in 5-20 years. It was suggested that MITx blurs the alumni lines. The logical evolution of MOOCs is to grow from single courses to bundled courses focuses […]
I lead the development of edX’s E-Commerce platform (Otto), and one of my biggest frustrations is integrating with payment processors. We currently use CyberSource and PayPal, and both have been painful to integrate. In both instances the pain comes from poor communication. My team spent about a week writing the CyberSource Secure Acceptance Web/Mobile integration primarily due […]