Over the course of three semesters, I gave lessons on coding at HacKSU, Kent State University's premier computer science student organization.

I've always enjoyed creative writing that takes practical, technical subjects that could easily be boring to read about and makes them oddly enthralling - writing like Joel Spolsky's old blog about software, or Matt Levine's finance column, Money Stuff. I tried to do the same thing during my time at HacKSU, where I was the official "lesson master" during my first semester before becoming the club president for the next two.

HacKSU ended up defining my experience at Kent State to a significant degree, and presented a lot of interesting challenges: I ended up being in charge of reconstituting the club's leadership from scratch at the beginning of the 2023-2024 academic year, and hopefully guided it towards being a hub for both technical meetings of the minds and social activity in the computer science department for the first time since the pandemic started. We covered a wide range of important programming ideas, and stayed late and talked with a number of interesting visitors from the software industry.

I started by putting a lot of work into the lessons that I gave, though. Occasionally building on examples created by earlier leaders, I carefully wrote out my thoughts on basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, Python, SQLite, Express, MongoDB, React, Vue, Flutter, and the fossil record of computer science, eventually hammering out a little over 30,000 words (about the same length as Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea) - plus about 2,500 more for the guide to hackathons that I wrote when we organized a hackathon. The format of these lessons is typically a fairly basic, gentle introduction, but I enjoyed using language to illuminate and sometimes re-derive the things that programmers take for granted in the technology stacks we use.