Catch Dave on Episode 006 of Greater Than Code! Getting Technology Into the Hands of Children with David Bock

02:10 - Dave’s Superpower: Ability to Reevaluate and Drop Ideas – Onto The Next!

• Star Trek: The Next Generation


• Impostor Syndrome

07:10 - The Acceptance of Ruby; Using Ruby as a Teaching Language

• Teaching Ruby Makes Approaching Computer Science Approachable


• Intro To Programming Skill Tree.md


• Computational Thinking


• Object-Oriented Programming


• Functional Programming


• Primer on Python Decorators

18:01 - Mobile Development

• Accessibility
  
  
  
  
  • FingerWorks
  
  


• Teaching Performance; Linear Algebra
  
  
  
  
  • Star 26 Math Puzzle
  
  
  • Aristotle Number Puzzle
  
  

24:10 - Teaching Remotely

• WatchDOG Dads


• Cameras On/Off


• % of Women Went Up / Gatekeeping and Gender Bias
  
  
  
  
  • Grace Hopper
  
  

34:25 - Computer Science Education Week + Teaching/Volunteering

• Hour of Code


• Code.org


• Scratch

“Computers aren’t smart. They’re just dumb really, really fast.”

• Understanding the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)


• Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea


• Plimpton 322

56:39 - Handling Time Management and Energy

• Ted Lasso


• Getting Positive by Looking at the Negative

Reflections:

Casey: Motivating students to learn algorithmic efficiency. Feeling the problem.

Mae: Becoming more involved in the community.

Chelsea: What are people in the tech world ready for?

Dave: How much talking about computer science education is invigorating and revitalizing. Seeing problems through beginners’ eyes.

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Transcript:

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CHELSEA: Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode 261. I’m Chelsea Troy and I’m here with my co-host, Mae.

MAE: And I’m here also with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I'm Casey. We're all here today with Dave Bock.

Welcome, Dave.

DAVE: Hi, glad to be here again.

CASEY: David Bock is the Vice President of Strategic Development at Core4ce, Inc. where he is responsible for taking new strategic ideas within the company through development and into production.

Dave speaks frequently on software engineering and management topics at software engineering conferences.

Dave’s true passion is his work as the Executive Director of Loudoun Codes, a nonprofit for teaching K-12 students in Loudoun County, Virginia topics related to computer science. He has been volunteering in classrooms since 2013, working with parents and teachers on an official curriculum, extracurricular, and other supplemental activities.

Welcome, Dave. We’re so glad to have you.

DAVE: I'm thrilled to be here. I love to talk about my passions.

CASEY: Speaking of your passions, we always start the episode with a certain question. I think you're ready for it.

DAVE: Yeah, I’m never ready for this question. [laughs]

CASEY: What's your superpower and how did you acquire it?

DAVE: You know it's funny, listening to this podcast over the years, I have answered that question in the car a dozen times and every time it's a different answer. Sometimes, I don't think there's a good answer for it. It's like trying to settle on what I wanted to talk about this time. Because it's like I don't have any superpowers; they're just mundane powers applied well.

But I think my superpower, if I had to pick one, I would say it is my ability to quickly reevaluate and drop ideas that I no longer find value in like, I don't get overly attached to an idea. I guess, that's the best way to put it.

The first time I realized thinking about that was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Captain Picard said to somebody that if you truly believe your convictions, you won't be afraid to reevaluate them, and that's just something that I've always kind of applied.

It came up again. My wife watches the TV show, House, which is now long since off the air, but the premise of that show was this doctor who was an expert in rare pathological diseases and he was a kind of a grumpy antihero doctor.

Every episode, there'd be some weird, rare disease and he'd be the first one to identify it and then some other symptom would present itself and he'd abandon that idea and move on to the next one. At one point somebody said to him, “You always think you're right,” and he said, “No, I always think I'm eventually right.” Because if you see it, he's always willing to drop an idea and move on to the next one even when other people were still wedded to the old idea and I think I apply that daily.

But even in my career, back in the 2006, 2007 timeframe, I was set. I could have kept as a Java developer for the rest of my career and instead, I abandoned it and started doing Ruby on Rails development. And I've since abandoned it again. Did the Clojure for a while, abandoned that again and got into management. I just didn't want to identify myself with any one track record too long.

MAE: Love it. Was that how you ended up having that approach is from TNG, or that is like a –? [overtalk]

DAVE: No, I just realized that I had that and that resonated with me. That line resonated with me, that stayed with me all these years. I can't say I noticed it the first time that I saw the episode. It was in a repeat one day that it just really struck me.

CASEY: When did you first realize you have this skill? Was it before that?

DAVE: I think when it was made conscious to me was around the time I was career switching. I had a resume in the Java space that sounded unbelievable. I was a president of the Northern Virginia Java Users Group. I was on the Java 6 Spec Committee. I was one of the 100 people that Sun had called a Java champion. And I really had – I was speaking at a Java themed software engineering conference.

I saw Ruby on Rails and I was like, “That is so cool.” It's such a breath of fresh air. It's like every decision that a team normally argues over for the first several weeks is just made, you can just start moving out. I quit my job, started a consultancy doing Rails development and kept with that for 8 years and it was a blast. Meanwhile, I had friends in the Java community who were