Annapolis-area blues duo Swampcandy — one half of which is comprised of bassist Joseph Mitchell ’09, music — launched a new CD and documentary film this month, according to a feature in the Capital newspaper.

The article states:

“Fresh in the footsteps of the last month’s successful Annapolis Film Festival, the combination of the 17-song CD, the vinyl release and the film premiere of “Midnight Creep” melds an already deep music scene to the emerging focus on film, underscoring Annapolis’s art-for-art’s-sake scene.

The crowd-funded film, like the duo’s music, is a mix of genres — part documentary, part music video, part art house.

Read the full Capital story here.

Mitchell, who has performed with Swampcandy founder Ruben Dobbs for two years, plays percussive standup bass and kickdrum. The documentary follows the creation of the new CD, and features plenty of performances.

Read more about the band here.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is the largest health insurer in the mid-Atlantic region, serving over three million members in Maryland, DC and Northern Virginia.  Our interns work on a part time basis in the fall and up to full time in the summer.  As the leading HealthCare Company we teach our interns best practices and procedures for creating and maintaining HealthCare information systems.

Qualifications:

Must be a student enrolled in an accredited college or university either junior or senior, will accept qualified sophomores, looking for GPA 3.0 or above. Majors Information Systems, Technology, Computer Science or related field. 

Exposure to Computer Science, Engineering, or Data Analysis / Survey Design preferred but not required.  Depending on the area of IT, any of the following may be required:

Abilities/Skills:

The ability to work independently and in small teams is necessary.  Good oral and written communications abilities are necessary. Strong Analytical and Organizational skills are required.  

We are looking for students who can work up to 20 (3 days/week) hours for the fall and potentially full time for the summer.

MUST BE AUTHORIZED TO WORK IN THE US WITHOUT SPONSORSHIP

Department:  eBusiness Solutions

We are an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and ADA compliant

To apply search Intern at:

www.carefirst.com/careers

I'm hard at work creating a brand new talk I'm so far calling "CSS is for Computers" that I plan to be giving and refining at some upcoming conferences.

There is a whole new series in The Lodge. Even if you aren't interested in the content of the lodge, but are interested in supporting CSS-Tricks, being a Lodge member is the best way to do that. As a thank you, you now don't see any ads no matter where you are on the site as a logged in Lodge member.

I'm still brainstorming new ideas for more Lodge content. My best idea so far is "Deep Dive" videos where posts/almanac entries/snippets/etc will have optional videos attached to them where the content is explained in more detail. Those videos will only be watchable by Lodge members. Just an idea.

CodePen is humming along! New features for all users include making auto-run JavaScript optional, making the Hire Me button for everybody, editor layout alternatives, and upgrading the editor as a foundation for many more editor improvements. PRO users now have asset hosting.

You'll want to stay tuned to CodePen. Tons more to come.

Lots of great conversations on ShopTalk lately including Brandon Mathis, Alex Sexton, Samantha Warren, and Lara Swanson.

There is a new feature on the ShopTalk website as well. Dave created Time Jump - a JavaScript plugin for deep linking times in podcasts. You can now link to specific times with a query string or hash, like:

http://mypodca.st/first-episode/?t=1h23m45s
    
    http://mypodca.st/first-episode/#t=23:45

To give it a spin, check out this time jump link to a very important question.

If you've never listened to ShopTalk, we also now have a master archives page to help you find episodes you might be interested in checking out.

Also new on ShopTalk, we now have ladies cut T-Shirts in The Store!

My latest Pastry Box Project entry was about introversion. It seemed to resonate pretty strongly with a lot of folks. I did a follow up article on my personal site with some of the reactions and further thoughts.

I'm moving to Milwaukee soon! It took me a while to find a place but eventually being vigilant on Craigslist panned out. Why Milwaukee? I have a bunch of friends there I visit fairly often and I always love it. I grew up in Wisconsin, but never lived in Milwaukee. Heading back to Wisconsin means being closer to family and old friends, which I like. Plus it's a lot less expensive than living in the San Francisco area, and I could use the savings as I'm out on my own trying to build a startup.

Looking forward to checking out Bucketworks and Lounge 42.

You may have noticed I replaced one of the rotating ads on the site with an ad for my tech alma mater Wufoo. I'm happy to have them as an advertiser because of course I still dearly love the product. For those that don't know, it's a very powerful (yet easy to use) online form builder.

You may have also noticed they sponsored the RSS feed for a few weeks there. I'm going to start doing that as there is demand for it. There are around 108,000 RSS readers, so if you want to run an ad in there, get in touch.

The latest edition of Appliness ("the first digital magazine for web application developers") features an interview with me!

CSS-Tricks Chronicle XII is a post from CSS-Tricks

UMCB CMSC alumnus Golois Mouelet is recruiting for software developers for RDA Corporation at 5pm-6:30pm on Tuesday, April 9th in troom 331 of the Commons.  He would like to meet with seniors and juniors.

RDA is launching a new software development center in Hunt Valley MD. They are looking for software developers who would like to expand their skills while learning from industry experts, and work on a variety of leading edge solutions (e.g. Web, Portal, Cloud, Mobile, and more) in a collaborative environment. They seek candidates with a strong desire to learn, a passion for technology, and a commitment to quality. Ideally, you will have a minimum of one year of development experience and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, but if you are excited about software development, have a go-getter personality, and skills you can demonstrate, they would like to meet you.

See this flier for more information: RDA information and recruiting

UMCB CMSC alumnus Golois Mouelet is recruiting for software developers for RDA Corporation at 5pm-6:30pm on Tuesday, April 9th in troom 331 of the Commons.  He would like to meet with seniors and juniors.

RDA is launching a new software development center in Hunt Valley MD. They are looking for software developers who would like to expand their skills while learning from industry experts, and work on a variety of leading edge solutions (e.g. Web, Portal, Cloud, Mobile, and more) in a collaborative environment. They seek candidates with a strong desire to learn, a passion for technology, and a commitment to quality. Ideally, you will have a minimum of one year of development experience and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, but if you are excited about software development, have a go-getter personality, and skills you can demonstrate, they would like to meet you.

See this flier for more information: RDA information and recruiting

The Teacher Spotlight is back! For those of you who haven’t read a Spotlight, each month we interview one of the Treehouse Teachers so you can get to know them a little better offscreen, and have a sneak peek into what makes them tick.

This month the spotlight is on Ruby and Rails mastermind, co-host of the Treehouse Show and The Ruby Show, and of course who can forget the infamous smile of… Treehouse teacher Jason Seifer!

The Interview:

When did you first start gaining an interest in web development? Did anyone inspire you?

I first got into web development in high school. I had a bunch of data that I wanted to work with and I didn’t know how else to sort through it, filter, search, etc. I wound up using early versions of PHP (php3!) and MySQL and wrote a search engine that was a parody of Altavista, which was the most popular search engine at the time.

What language did you first start with? Which is your preferred language now?

I first started programming using Basic when I was very young (about 6 years old). I made silly little stick figure animations that cleared the screen and did other fun and unimportant things. My dad was an accountant and he wrote his own bookkeeping software so he taught me a little bit about how to program.
My first computer was a TRS-80 which I worked with for several years until my parents got a Compaq Presario which was a whopping 66 Mhz. I remember being pretty psyched when we got an overdrive processor which brought us to something like 88 Mhz. I was the one who got to install it and my parents were a bit nervous that I would have to take apart the whole computer. I acted surprised after I took the entire computer apart and pretended not to know what the old processor was. I’ve always been a bit of a prankster.

After basic, I dabbled in Perl, PHP, Pascal, and a few others. These days I prefer to use Ruby or JavaScript, but there are so many languages out there these days. Erlang has an extremely interesting approach to programming if you can get over the syntax. I’ll probably look in to Objective C and iOS programming next.

What are some new web technologies (bleeding edge) that you’re excited about?

I think the live streaming in Rails 4.0 is going to be pretty awesome once people really start to figure out the best ways to use it. Real time Ruby on Rails is going to be a pretty cool way of programming. Right now the best option for real time is Web Sockets but I think there will be quite a bit that we can do with Rails live streaming and the JavaScript EventSource.

On the other end of the spectrum, I’m excited that we are seeing a time that we are closer to being able to stop supporting legacy browsers that don’t support the latest technologies. We’re still a ways off but I think that, as a whole, that will drive the web forward more than anything else.

When you have a big project ahead of you, how do you stay in the zone when coding?

I don’t! I was introduced to the Pomodoro Technique by Corey Haines and that completely changed the way I work. The basic premise is that you work for 25 minutes then you have a 5 minute break. Repeat as necessary until you’ve worked all day. You’d be very surprised what you accomplish by the end of the day. It’s also a bit liberating to know that you can get your social media and email addiction out of the way in 5 minute increments throughout the day.

What’s your favorite thing about hosting the Treehouse Show? Has the fame gone to your head at all?

My favorite thing about hosting the Treehouse Show is being able to interact with Nick Pettit’s fauxhawk on a weekly basis. It is perfectly coiffed and taller in person than you may guess from viewing it on the web.

I wouldn’t say that the fame has gone to my head at all. I’m still just like everyone else– I wake up, get dressed, and have my pilot fly me from my private island to the helipad on the top of Treehouse HQ in order to avoid the web paparazzi.

Tell us something about yourself you don’t think anyone would ever assume!

When the beta of Netscape Navigator 2.0 came out, I sent them a bug report documenting that pop-up windows could open other pop-up windows. They ignored it. I nearly saved the world from pop-ups.

Wrap Up

We hope you enjoyed this month’s Spotlight interview with Jason, and remember to tune in on Tuesdays to catch Jason and Nick in a new episode of the Treehouse Show.

We’ll see you next month for another interview and another opportunity to get to know a Treehouse teacher offscreen.

The post Teacher Spotlight: Jason Seifer appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Here is UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski's talk at the 2013 TED conference. He is, as usual, very inspirational. We are truly lucky to have him leading our university.

"If a student has a sense of self, it’s amazing how their dreams and values can make all the difference in the world."

Look for his mention of computer science and women in IT near the end.