Explaining programming to kids at great american teach-in

I got wonderful opportunity to volunteer for great american teach-in at Morgan woods elementary school, Tampa. I did presentation on explaining programming to 3rd to 5th grade students. In this post, I will share by experiences on talking to kids about programming and conversations I had with them.

Preparation

The invitation letter from school suggested “share with students something about your career, your experiences, your hobby, or yourself”.

How can we deal with influences of past karma?

We have heard about law of karma or cause and effect. Every action we do generates a force of energy that returns to us in kind. If we had committed bad actions in past (or in previous birth) inevitably that will bring bad consequences in present life.

My brother wrote an article about Astrology and Theory of Karma. This is follow up to that article providing spiritual answer to how to deal with influences of bad karma based on my learnings from Bhagavad Gita and Seven Spiritual Laws of Success Book

How can we deal with influences of past Karma?

There are three things you can do about past karma.

Setting up your blog using Jekyll and hosting it on github

I wrote about my journey that led to choosing Jekyll based Poole framework as blogging platform for this site in my previous post . I have kept skeleton of my site in a separate foundation branch for others to easily use. You are free to fork mine to use for your own site.

In this post I will provide instructions on how to setup your own blog by using my jekyll project as foundation.

Blogging platform for hackers - Octopress vs Docpad vs Poole

In this post I will walk through my journey of discovering right blogging platform for my site, share my experiences and findings along the way.

When I decided to blog, I researched on next generation blogging platforms for hackers. Mainstream blogging platforms like wordpress, blogger, tumblr are designed for naive users and aren’t best for developers. Because those platforms doesn’t support features programmers would want like code syntax highlighting, theming using frond end frameworks, Markdown language support, integration with source control repositories, etc.

Static site generators:

How Children Succeed?

This post is about my reflections on the book How Children Succeed which I recently read.

What matters most in a child’s development for them to succeed in life?

We mostly think that intelligent and smart people succeed, i.e success comes to those who score highest in school, college or competitive exams like SAT, GMAT etc. But in How Children Succeed, Paul Tough argues that the qualities that matter more for success are have to do with the character.

In a child’s development, what matters most is not how much information we can stuff into his/her brain in the first few years. But, instead is whether we are able to help him/her develop a very different set of qualities like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Infact, possessing these qualities helps a child to get high scores in exams consistently than intelligence alone.

Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.