The Node.js project and its community have undergone major changes in recent years, among which is the forking of the project (and perhaps the community itself). This situation causes confusion for newcomers, who find themselves with compatibility issues and difficulties in setting up a working and up-to-date environment. In this post, I show how to get the recent version of Node.js on a Linux OS in an easy way.

GitHub is on the brink of growing from a platform for software projects, and into a mainstream collaboration platform for other domains as well. An unexpected area where GitHub’s collaborative workflow holds the potential to bring groundbreaking changes is education and learning. In fact, educators have already begun to use GitHub to support teaching and learning. In some cases using it to replace certain aspects of the traditional learning management systems (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle), while in other cases gaining new benefits and capabilities.

I recently discovered a superb podcast on startups (in Hebrew). And, I wanted to download the episodes, so that I can listen to it when I commute to work. The podcast homepage has a page for each episode, with a download link at the bottom. However, instead of downloading each episode manually, I decided to find an easier way, with the use of the command line. And to make it more interesting, I wanted to accomplish this with a single command line.

As a Ph.D. student, I have the opportunity to attend many cool conferences and co-located events (e.g., ICSE, CSCW, ICSME). However, beyond visiting beautiful places around the world (Switzerland, India, Canada, and Italy soon), I really enjoy meeting and connecting with people. In my experience, most people I’ve met at conferences were really great, super nice, and were very happy to talk to me, even though they didn’t actually know me or had any immediate outcome in mind. In this post I provide pointers—especially intended for new grad students—for meeting people at conferences.