Today, I watched my son Thorin get born. His momma worked very hard and he slipped out into the world. We spent 36 long hours getting him there and I am so tired I am going to fall into a coma, but it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Welcome!
Hi - I'm Clinton, and I'm the CTO of Momentum Learning in Durham, NC. I've previously worked with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, The Iron Yard, and RTI International, among others. My big passions are my kids and making the world of programming a more welcoming and diverse place.
Recent articles
This year, I’m thankful for:
- My wife and son, so much. They are the reason I do it all.
- My new son, soon to be born! I cannot wait to meet you, little guy! I felt your foot through your mom’s belly the other night and it was super-weird but also amazing.
- My students, current and former. I am surrounded by an amazing group of people taking control of their lives and becoming computer wizards. I want to give them all a hug.
- My team at The Iron Yard. Jessica, Chet, and Amy have made these last few months just incredible.
- Breathing deeply. Some days, I don’t even know how I’d make it with deep breaths.
- My friends, especially my game group, who are my pals, my intellectual challengers, and my priests.
- All the amazing women in my life. You inspire me and give me hope for a better world.
Istanbul (not Constantinople)
Around three years ago, I began the process of changing my name from Clinton Nixon to Clinton Dreisbach: that is, I took my wife’s last name. I did it six years after we were married, which made it a bit more unusual.
For years, I’d been considering it, but couldn’t quite figure out why. I knew I wanted to as a feminist in order to make a small, tiny attack on the traditional way of doing things, but there was something deeper.
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Beating the odds
I love making little games in new programming languages. Blackjack is one of my favorites to implement, and I often give it as a first-week assignment in my programming classes.
Read more...My bash prompt
My prompt has expanded and contracted over the years. When developing more in Ruby and Python, I found it very important to keep my current language versions in the prompt, but these days it’s more important to me that my prompt works on every Unix-based machine I might log on to.
I keep my prompt setup in a file called prompt.sh, of course.
Here’s what my prompt looks like after running a command for 10 seconds that resulted in an error:
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Teen Tech Camp 2013 - Python and Pi
On August 13, I was lucky enough to get to help with the 2nd annual Durham County Library Teen Tech Camp. It was organized by Julia Elman and Sarah Kahn, while Kurt Grandis developed the curriculum. All I had to do was stand in front of a room of awesome teens and teach them to program in Python all day, which was awesome. I am one of the rare people who enjoys public speaking, and I love helping people learn about technology, so I was in heaven.
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Quines!
A quine is a program that, when run, outputs itself. Here’s one you can run in your browser: quine = function () { console.log("quine = %s; quine()", quine) }; quine().
“Whorld” by Zol, using Context Free Art
If you are using Chrome or Safari to look at this page, you can get to a Javascript console by going to your menu and choosing Tools > Javascript Console.
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