Friday, May 7, 2010

Think Twice, Code Once

Earlier this week, I was interviewing a freshman math major who participated in Yahoo! Hack Week at the Jacobs School in April (stay tuned for full story). She mentioned a saying that one of her computer programming teammates told her during the 24-hour coding session:

Think twice, code once.

This reminds me of the saying one of my farmer uncles like to say: "Measure twice, cut once."

Junkyard Derby is Next Week! (400th blog post)

Junkyard Derby is a most worthy subject for my 400th post on this blog about all things Jacobs School.

The best way to get a taste of Junkyard Derby is to see it for yourself. You'll have to wait till next Friday, but in the meantime, there are a couple of options.

First option: Watch the video from last year's Junkyard Derby.



Second option: Check out the "Mad Dash for Trash" next Wednesday evening. That's the official beginning of Junkyard Derby. At the sound of the whistle, all the teams rush into a mountain of scavenged junk (abandoned furniture and old bikes are always popular). They grab the raw materials (aka Junk) that they will fashion into lean, mean, racing machines in the following 36 hours.

If I remember right, last year they even had folks out there with welding tools to help the teams transform junk into race cars.

Learn all about Junkyard Derby at the official TESC site:
http://tesc.ucsd.edu/derby/