Thomas Ballinger

@ballingt

Off Twitter until the new year! Programming! REPLs! Learning and helping people learn. formerly of and HMS, now I work at Dropbox in SF. he/him

ballingt.com
Joined December 2010
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  1. Pinned Tweet
    13 Oct 2016

    I'm excited to share , a live programming environment that rewinds to when the function you just changed last ran.

    6 replies 162 retweets 343 likes
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  2. 20 hours ago

    I'm excited to be teaching a programming languages course at ! Since a few people have asked, I'm still at and very happy there. This is a fun way to share my excitement about (and bone up on!) CS topics outside of work.

    Very excited to welcome to the Bradfield teaching team! As the first facilitator at he spent 4 years helping participants develop their skills and interests software of all kinds. Thrilled to have him share his enthusiasm with the Bradfield community 🎉
    2 replies 32 likes
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  3. Retweeted
    Jan 11

    imo, language properties -- visual or textual, declarative or imperative, English-like or not -- matter for learning only insofar as they let users feel a quicker connection to the domain they actually care about

    "It is not enough to say that users need systems that are 'easy to use'; end user programming systems should allow users to solve simple problems within their domain of interest _within a few hours of use_."
    1 reply 4 retweets 20 likes
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  4. Retweeted
    Jan 11

    with computers, i don't think the language you learn to program in matters but the environment does people get started in neopets pages or tumblr themes or PK Hack or gamemaker studio or excel macros

    2 replies 26 retweets 166 likes
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  5. Retweeted
    Jan 11

    Btw, if you're into language tooling we're hiring both part-time (remote ok) and full-time people. Lots of the work will be OSS.

    3 replies 14 retweets 32 likes
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  6. Retweeted
    Jan 10

    Working on a generalized (efficient) checkpointing system for REPLs. Imagine time travel working on basically any language.

    3 replies 14 retweets 70 likes
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  7. Jan 11

    AAAAAAAH they're doing it!!!!

    Working on a generalized (efficient) checkpointing system for REPLs. Imagine time travel working on basically any language.
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    8 likes
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  8. Jan 7

    ( also has beautiful support for getting a react project up and running in seconds, lest this look like a making the "real" way less available)

    1 like
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  9. Jan 7

    also "here's event driven programming and your output medium more mutably-stateful that a terminal"

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  10. Jan 7

    I think this is huge, it smooths the stepwise jump from terminal programs to GUIs. Going from terminal tictactoe to "Now learn HTML and CSS and JS, oh btw JS needs a compile step now" is a giant stumbling block

    It's crazy: we launched a small experiment that adds graphics support to the terminal (sixels) and it's just exploding in our community. 🎮 2048, play here: 👨‍💻 built by a 13 y/o in C++ 🔺 Upvote here:
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    2 replies 4 retweets 14 likes
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  11. Retweeted
    Jan 4

    And many educational videos are inaccessible for disabled people. It’s rare that I find captions. Most don’t offer textual alternatives to visuals (slides, code, captions even) for blind, low-vision, and colorblind people. And videos are timed content which forces a certain pace.

    I've never been into videos for learning, either watching or producing. I've always learned best from blog posts, docs, and digging into source directly. One downside of videos I figured out today: if something changes (like a package version), it's harder to update a video.
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    2 replies 9 retweets 10 likes
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  12. Retweeted
    Jan 4

    "The deep dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses" is now available in text form! Plus links to some of the code and an archived version of the web interface I used.

    5 replies 119 retweets 271 likes
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  13. Retweeted
    Jan 3

    How I Survived My Battle With Unsolicited Advice About My Battle With the Borrow Checker

    1 retweet 27 likes
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  14. Retweeted
    Jan 2

    In case you hadn't heard... 🌟 I'm looking for a job! 🌟 I wrote some things about who I am, what I'm looking for, and how to get in touch 👩🏻‍💻 Highlights: - Mid-level developer, love the Web - Austin, TX or remote - Looking for mature and focused team

    46 replies 209 retweets 389 likes
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  15. Retweeted
    27 Nov 2018

    "Functional programming can have a reputation for favoring elegance or concision over practicality" Amandine Lee shares best practices for how and when to include FP in your Python code, so you don't end up confusing other readers or your future self!

    3 retweets 12 likes
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  16. Retweeted
    Jan 1

    replace branch instructions with brunch instructions

    1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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  17. Retweeted
    28 Dec 2018

    2018 personal work in review

    2 retweets 4 likes
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  18. Retweeted
    31 Dec 2018

    Closing out 2018 with a major new release of Beautiful Soup. () In 4.7.0, CSS selector support goes from 'haphazard' to 'nearly complete' with the inclusion of Isaac Muse's SoupSieve (). Please use it to make things better!

    2 retweets 9 likes
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  19. Retweeted
    29 Dec 2018

    Today, I'm grateful for my teammates whove inspired and supported me through out 2018 .

    2 replies 4 retweets 18 likes
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  20. Retweeted
    30 Dec 2018

    / javascript style twitter / if you have a function that returns an array, and want to create a similar function that returns the same things but as a generator, how do you name the two to differentiate? for example: permutationHeap & genPermutationsHeap? permutationsHeapGen?

    5 replies 1 retweet 4 likes
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  21. Retweeted
    29 Dec 2018

    me: "networking is the most important thing you can do for your career!" also me: [wastes half my Dunbar slots on pseudonymous Twitter weirdos]

    5 replies 17 retweets 124 likes
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