2018 has been a year of exploration and experimentation in software development for the CTL Development team. We shared our professional and personal experiences developing educational technology, and lessons learned here on CompilED. The following is a list of the posts we wrote last year.
Disentangling an Imagemap for Accessibility
By Zarina Mustapha | December 19, 2018
Application design for accessibility and inclusion is not simply a technical implementation appended to a development process. The awareness of the learning process informs us how we should code to ensure that the intended pedagogy can be processed by everyone, with differing abilities, through all devices.
How to make an analog clock (Part 1)
By Nik Nyby | December 2, 2018
This post goes over how to simulate the motion of an analog clock programmatically.
Notes from Grace Hopper Connect @ Google 2018
By Susan Dreher | September 28, 2018
The Grace Hopper Celebration is a yearly event to highlight the contributions of women to computing. In lieu of jumping on a plane to Houston this year, I instead attended the first Grace Hopper Connect @ Google event in NYC.
Making the Map
By Susan Dreher | September 26, 2018
Mapping visualizations have been a core component of many of our custom digital learning applications. The geographical interactives have promoted a significantly richer experience, deepening understanding and encouraging exploration and discovery. My understanding of how to build these applications has improved through collaboration with our clients, the talented faculty and students who form the basis of our audience.
Protecting Django Model Instances
By Nick Buonincontri | September 26, 2018
How to protect arbitrary Django model instances.
Considerations for Search
By Zarina Mustapha | September 19, 2018
Search functionality requires a thoughtful deliberation so that the model, UI, and UX can best serve the users’ needs. This post lists some useful guiding questions for that feature.
A Range Input for Scientific Applications
By Nik Nyby | August 23, 2018
This post describes how to change the behavior of an <input type=range> to something that may be more appropriate for certain scientific applications.
How to Use Your Own Linux Kernel
By Nik Nyby | July 30, 2018
If you’re using Linux, using your own Linux kernel has benefits that might be helpful to you. And once things are set up on your system, keeping up to date is as straightforward as doing a periodic sudo apt upgrade.
How to animate graphical JavaScript programs
By Nik Nyby | July 27, 2018
You can now do even more in JavaScript than you ever could in Flash. Here’s an outline on how to take advantage of some of this technology.
Managing Risk
By Susan Dreher |July 11, 2018
IT Risk management is an ever expanding area of interest throughout the software development community. Traditional risk management practices are applied to ensure organizations can withstand unfortunate events like power outages and natural disasters. Additional processes are layered on to deal with events particular to production software systems, such as security vulnerabilities or severe bugs.
Netcat Tricks
By Nick Buonincontri | June 29, 2018
Useful things to do with Netcat.
Notes from Wagtail Space US
By Zarina Mustapha | June 26, 2018
This month, I attended and presented at the first Wagtail Space conference/sprint in the USA. Wagtail Space USA, led by the parent company Torchbox, took place on June 14th–16th at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This post is summary of the event.
Choosing Wagtail: A Story of Process
By Zarina Mustapha | June 17, 2018
The DevTeam at the CTL continuously research and evaluate existing and new software for possible uses in developing educational technologies at Columbia University. This post describes the evaluation process that led us to choosing Wagtail, an open source CMS written in Python on the Django framework, as one of the tools for us to use at the CTL.
How to Use Mediawiki’s API to Export Content
By Nik Nyby | May 7, 2018
MediaWiki’s API has been around since before REST APIs were commonplace. So it’s a little idiosyncratic, but still useful and flexible.
Better Sed with Perl
By Nick Buonincontri | April 2, 2018
Though sed has facilities to manage multi-line operations, they can be hard to understand initially. Perl can offer an easier set of tools.
Print Is a Device
By Zarina Mustapha | April 2, 2018
Printing web content has not fallen out of favor, and because it is very much ingrained in the culture of content consumption, we need to include the printed media in our web development process. In this post, I offer some guidance because web printing is not as straightforward as one might assume.
Google@Columbia AR and VR Demonstration
By Shashi Yellambhatla | March 30, 2018
In late February, Emerging Technology Consortium at Columbia hosted an interactive workshop featuring Google AR and VR technologies. Google showcased a few of their products that could potentially be implemented in teaching and learning.
Creating a flexible authorization system
By Susan Dreher | March 8, 2018
Implementing complex authorization rules for a Django-based application was simplified by the framework’s permission & authorization classes at the class-level. Instance-level permissioning proved to be more complicated.
MediaWiki’s Visual Editor, and text editing on the web in general
By Nik Nyby | February 27, 2018
Editing and formatting text on the web comprises of an interesting sub-field of web development. The web allows for different ways to turn text into HTML markup. First I’ll outline some of the background of interactive text formatting on the web from my perspective, and then go into some configuration details of MediaWiki’s Visual Editor that I found interesting.
Printed from: https://compiled.ctl.columbia.edu/articles/wrap-up-2018/