In 2013, I purchased And Man Created God amid a wave of the rebirth of a rationalist, athiest wave of thinkers coming to the fore. In retrospect, this movement is commonly called New Atheism. Around that time, Christopher Hitchens published God is not Great; Sam Harris, The End of Faith; and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Amid this shift in honest discussion of anti-theism, atheism, and belief, I was curious as to when and why theism became a core part of mankind’s lifestyle. Why posit this thing that so clearly lacks evidence? Whence this desire?

This books does not answer those questions. Indeed, they might not have any answers that can be reliably extracted from the historical record. Rather, the book performs an inventory on the characters and propositions of religions near the beginning of the common era (AD, if you’re old school) and what happens to them around the time of the rise of Christianity.

In the time covered, religions had reached a stunning level of vibrancy and diversity: god-kings of Africa, an organized Greco-Roman pantheon, the sons and daughters of jealous Yahweh, the binary split of evil and good in Zoroastrianism, etc. By the end of this period, the widest-reaching religions that will spread to the most adherents have adopted a common character:

urbanist, universalist, personalized mystery religion appealing to supernatural agents of divine law on behalf of the humiliated.

I was recently reduced from the staff of the Flatiron School and, after my GitHub accounts were terminated, I still had a ton of repos that had been forked from the company’s accounts to my own. The GitHub web UI doesn’t help with bulk actions, so I scripted it.

Strategy

1. Use hub’s low-level API to generate a death list in a file
2. Peruse the file
3. Feed the file into hub to do the deletion

Introduction

Over the last year, my team and I have created a single-source-of-truth accounting for the Software Engineering program at The Flatiron School built on AirTable. I believe this system offers a superior means for managing curriculum development, documentation, and collaboration.

I’ve written a series of posts documenting this solution that starts here.

The audience for the full series is fellow-educators or content-production pipeline managers. In this post, I’ll provide an introduction to the problem at hand.

Thanks

Let me express thanks to our executive sponsor, my boss, Brian Tobal as well as my staff: Jen, Maxwell, Mohawk, our previous collaborators Jason and Daniel. Let me also thank the countless issue-reporters or pull-request authors that helped along the way. It was Brian’s faith in the idea of “modular” curriculum and support for it at the organizational level when the ROI was murky that gave us the time to prove the payoff to our convictions.

I believe that the secret to designing thoughtful educational experiences as well as teams that design them is building a robust artifact that I call an accounting.

“The Accounting“

An “accounting” can be grasped by this graphic:

To translate into words, the accounting:

1. documents the binding between atomic student capabilities ("Learning Goals") and macro-objects ("Lessons") or nth-order macro-objects (e.g. "Unit", "Modules", or "Products"), and
2. calculates the chain of dependencies for any given capability that includes its recursive dependencies back to first principles (i.e. transitive dependencies)