Michael Ball
Continuing Lecturer at University of California, Berkeley
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Ball is a lecturer and software engineer with 13 years of experience building educational tools and curricula at UC Berkeley and beyond. He blends full‑stack engineering with pedagogy, contributing to projects like the visual programming language Snap! and helping scale introductory CS courses through thoughtful course design and automation. At Gradescope he shipped educator-facing features; at Berkeley he has led TA training, curriculum development, and produced widely used instructional videos. He focuses on tools that surface best practices organically during use, believing context matters as much as code. Based in San Francisco, he pairs hands‑on implementation with research-informed teaching to improve how students learn computing.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyMaster’s Degree, Computer Science, Master’s Degree, Computer Science at UC Berkeley College of EngineeringRuben S. Ayala High School
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (13)
html10
visual10
snap10
programming-language10
javascript10
rails10
bootstra10
front-end-development10
bootstrap10
ruby-on-rails10
css8
back-end-development8
backend8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
jmoenig/Snap
Dec 2013 - Aug 2022
a visual programming language inspired by Scratch
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 39 reviews, 277 commits in 8 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the development of features within the visual programming language "Snap!". Their work included implementing watchers for mouse coordinates and adding a 'get current DATE' block with various options, along with translations to French and German. Additionally, the user refactored code for the 'Split' block and addressed issues related to saving and exporting projects, indicating work across frontend and backend aspects of the project.
bjcvisualbyobcompilervisual-programming-language
saasbook/rottenpotatoes-rails-intro
Sep 2020 - Sep 2020
RottenPotatoes app skeleton for saasbook/hw-rails-intro
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 13 commits, 5 PRs in 1 day
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on improving the RottenPotatoes application's front-end and layout. Their contributions included tidying up the HTML structure, adding Bootstrap classes for better styling and responsiveness, and implementing flash message display using a partial. The user also addressed code quality by removing debugger statements and modifying the movie controller and views. Overall, the contributions centered on enhancing the user interface and code maintainability.
skeletonrailssaasapp-skeleton
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