Tresys Technology, a provider of technology and engineering services for customers with high-security requirements, announced this week it has established and awarded the first two grants of its new “Tresys Technology Scholarship” to UMBC students. The two merit-based scholarships of $2,500 each were awarded for the Spring 2013 semester to juniors Sven Rivera and Sean Hoover.

The scholarship is intended to support incoming sophomore or junior computer science majors at UMBC with demonstrated financial need and who have obtained or transferred a grade point average of 3.0 or greater. There is a preference given to students interested in computer security. The scholarship, managed by the UMBC Foundation, may be renewed for a second year, contingent on the student’s academic performance and continued financial need. Scholarship recipients are also invited to apply for paid internship positions at Tresys.

“Tresys is truly honored and delighted to give back to the community through this scholarship,” said Tresys CEO Gary Latham. “By investing in tomorrow’s computer security professionals at the outset of their careers, we are helping deserving students pursue careers that will make a significant difference—not only to them specifically—but to the communities Tresys serves and to the future security of our nation.”

For more information or to apply for future awards of this scholarship, visit http://www.coeit.umbc.edu/coeit-scholarships.

About Tresys Technology

Based in Columbia, Maryland, with offices in Ashburn, VA, Tresys Technology solves the most complex information security problems for a wide array of defense, intelligence, and commercial customers. Tresys provides innovative product and services solutions for hard problems in Cross Domain, Deep Content Inspection, secure operating systems—including SELinux—mobile devices and OSs, and software assurance. Our knowledge of the secure design, certification, and accreditation of complicated custom hardware and software solutions, combined with insight into the sophisticated requirements of our customers, allows us to deliver innovative solutions to modern security challenges. The experience gained from solving real-world problems has enabled Tresys to develop industry-leading and authoritative services. For more information, visit: http://www.tresys.com.

He brought us jQuery, the most widely used JavaScript library on the planet. Then he brought us Processing.js, a JavaScript port of the popular data visualization programming language. Now, John Resig is on a mission to revamp the way people learn programming as the Dean of Computer Science for Khan Academy. The man never stops (does he even sleep?) giving back to the community, and after being out of the public eye for some time, I caught up with him to find out what he’s been up to.

Around :) But more seriously, I decided to spend more time doing application and server-side development — something that I didn’t spend much time on when I was working on jQuery full-time.

I was spending less time on the day-to-day bug fixing of jQuery and wanted to make sure that the project was going to be in good hands as I started to work on other things. They’ve been doing an excellent job of keeping the library in great shape. It’s in good hands!

I’ve been working on a number of different projects. I created the framework that we use for building exercises (available on Github https://github.com/khan/khan-exercises), helped build the Khan Academy iPad application, created the Computer Science platform, and am now working on internationalizing the site, making it available in many languages to people all over the world.

I decided to spend more time doing application and server-side development.

I’m really excited by the work that we’re doing at Khan Academy. We’ve been working to find ways of teaching the basics of programming to those that’ve never programmed before. Additionally we’re finding ways of integrating Computer Science education with our existing math and science curriculum—tying all the pieces together.

This makes a lot of sense and provides a cohesive way of learning that other programming platforms don’t have. Understanding algrebra is an important prerequisite to understanding variables, for example. Understanding trigonometry is important for doing graphics work. Combining all of this together makes a lot of sense. At least right now, we’re primarily targeting our existing K-12 audience. Thus far we’ve had about 2.9m users of the platform since we launched it in August 2012.

I’m really excited by the work that we’re doing at Khan Academy.

At least at the moment, Khan Academy is primarily targeting material that is more geared towards people of a younger age (pre-college). Many students use the material as a supplement to their existing work—or even as part of a class (depending upon the school). We’ve seen some great results from schools that use Khan Academy as part of their curriculum, getting students to use the material in class and consuming both the videos and exercises at their own pace. In this way, Khan Academy is actually very different from many of the other education solutions out there (not focusing on college courses, for example) and is filling an incredibly valuable niche.

We use JavaScript and Processing.js and a real-time programming environment to give students an easy way to get started and interact with the code. We’ve recently been finding ways to get students to collaborate on each other’s work. When we launched, we included the ability for students to “fork” each other’s code. We’ve added in some ways to make these forks easily discoverable which has resulted in a number of students building off of each other’s work. It’s fascinating to see it in progress!

I’ve been working on i18n for two projects: one is a side project and the other is the Khan Academy site. It’s been quite challenging; we have a large site with many pieces of original content that need translating. Getting all the moving pieces organized and given some semblance of order is definitely quite tricky. Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that already help with this stuff (for example we’re using the Jed.js library to do some pluralization work on the client-side).

Pretty awesome! It’s so great to see so many people getting benefit out of using it. It’s amazing that even with new browsers and APIs, we’re still not at the point of having a completely seemless cross-browser development experience. It’s getting closer, and jQuery absolutely helps with that, but I’m looking forward to the day in which we have a truly unified, easy-to-use, development API.

Oh, there’s always sniping. I think there’s a tendency for people to see poorly-written code as representative of all code written with a library or language, and that’s obviously just not so.

An especially tricky issue is that since jQuery usage is so ubiquitous, it means that nearly everyone is using it in some way — including people who don’t know how to program at all and just copy-paste code together without caring how it works. The best way we can combat this is to try and provide better educational materials to those wanting to become better programmers, like the new jQuery Learning Center

Oh, the Selectors API, absolutely (the Selectors API is what gives us querySelectorAll and allows us to query for DOM nodes using CSS selectors). Amusingly, the fact that jQuery popularized the usage of CSS selectors to find DOM nodes is what encouraged its standardization to begin with. It’s a chicken-and-egg situation :)

As someone who writes a lot of JavaScript, I’ve been spending more time with Node.js and PhantomJS. These environments give you the ability to write JavaScript on the server-side and do all sorts of scripting and application authoring. It’s really fun to be able to write JavaScript and have it work on both the client and server (for example, being able to share logic for a client-server game).

We’ve seen some great results from schools that use Khan Academy as part of their curriculum.

I think the biggest thing to happen to browsers in the past few years is the shift to a rapid release cycle, championed by the Chrome team and then taken up by the Firefox team. Having releases that come out every three months instead of every year (or every other year) completely changes how new features are introduced and used by developers. Any browser that wishes to remain competitive is going to have to keep up with this breakneck development schedule; otherwise, they’ll surely lag behind.

Increasing we access for more people (and with a good browser!) is really a victory for all. We haven’t been targeting this explicitly at Khan Academy, but there’s an awesome project called KA Lite which is attempting to make this happen.

I still think it’s possible, but it’s hard to say how much benefit there would be from doing that. If the code was already pre-compiled into bytecode and was just waiting in memory, then I’d imagine there would be some nice speed-ups. That being said, I bet that the speed-ups would be less than those provided by performance improvements to the DOM overall.

It certainly has been a journey! I wrote the bulk of the content over 2008-2010, and my co-author, Bear Bibeault, has worked on it over 2011-2012. I think it’s still exceptionally relevant to modern development.

The first half of the book covers best practices and some of the trickier aspects of modern JavaScript development. The second half covers the DOM and everything you need to know in order to write cross-browser code. These two topics are still an ever-present part of JavaScript development today and should help everyone from intermediate to advanced developers.

Probably not! At least not a traditional printed book. I’m keen to do more blogging and article writing. If I ever do write another book, it’ll definitely be self-published and likely in ebook-only form.

I’m loving New York. I’ve been meeting a wide range of developers here, and I’ve been surprised at how strong the community is here with tons of meetups, lectures, hack-a-thons, and other events going on. While I’ve only been here for a short time, it feels like that community is only growing stronger.

Having releases that come out every three months instead of every year completely changes how new features are introduced and used by developers.

Sure thing! I’ve been spending more time exploring art and have become fascinated with one art form in particular: Japanese Woodblock Printing. This was an art form in Japan that was popularized from the early 1700s until the late 1800s (and continuing on into the present day, although as a niche).

The prints depict the incredible world of samurai, warlods, gods, beauties, and nature. They’re extremely vivid and look surprisingly modern. I’ve been putting my programming skills to use and have developed a tool for researchers that aggregates prints from a number of museums around the world and makes them image searchable: http://ukiyo-e.org/ I’ve been getting a very positive response from a number of scholars, which has been most rewarding.