dsilver's comments

Another similar visualization to add to the list. This one by Mike Bostock, the D3 author. The month outlines are a nice addition.

http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4063318

I don't think the article is an argument that as a hard rule CS majors are predetermined to be great job candidates. In fact, the author draws a line between students who take on side projects and are passionate about the material and students who are doing it for the supposed payout.

Recruiting software engineers is about finding the passionate engineers who are proven problem solvers regardless of programming language or given tools. Those people might be computer science majors, and they might be non-majors (or non-students) who have a passion and skill for problem solving.

I've worked with and learned from great engineers who did not formally study engineering and those who have devoted their life to it. It's ultimately about having the drive to pursue (software) engineering. Those people tend to self identify by enriching their education with their own side projects.

Ultimately, Computer Science education is (and should be) exactly what it says. The science of computing. It doesn't require a computer, and it isn't software engineering. By studying great algorithms, data structures, design techniques, etc, you are well on your way to skill set of a successful software engineer, not because you know about splay trees or automata, but because you have practiced advanced problem solving, which is at the core of any engineering.

This one in particular uses the jQuery onepage-scroll plugin [0] for the scrolling effects, prism.js [1] for code syntax highlighting and some plain HTML and CSS. Here's the complete code: https://github.com/emisfera/Splitchar.js/tree/gh-pages.

In reference to some other comments on this thread, this isn't built using Jekyll. GitHub pages supports pure static sites and Jekyll-powered sites if you put either on the gh-pages branch of the repository.

[0] https://github.com/peachananr/onepage-scroll [1] http://prismjs.com/

This one actually uses the canvas element instead of svg. Just another awesome thing about D3: it works equally well with both. You can draw svg paths just as easily as you can draw them on a canvas.

Cool example of canvas[0] vs svg[1]. The canvas renders heavy animation a bit better. Both are around the same number of lines of code.

[0] http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/9539958

[1] http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/1062544

Part of a whole family of maze visualizations created in the past day by Mike Bostock:

Maze Generator: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11159599

Maze Solver: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11161648

Maze Flooder: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11167589

Maze Solver with Best-First Search Algorithm: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/11189414

(Edit: Best-First Search, not A*.)

It's awesome to see interesting algorithm visualizations in D3 (or other web standards) as opposed to Java applets. Especially as a student who has to do algorithm visualizations... in Java applets.

The solution for n competing standards is n + 1 competing standards.[0]

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/

Of all things, this happens as Google's Site Reliability Engineering team starts an AMA on Reddit[1].

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1w1y5m/we_are_the_goog...