Wow, the world is different. I was supposed to attend the 10th NSF/TCPP Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Computing Education (EduPar-20) in conjunction with the 34th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium in beautiful New Orleans, LA but then the COVID-19 pandemic happened, and IPDPS went virtual. The EduPar'20 team did a fantastic job transitioning the conference to a virtual format, and I really enjoyed attending.
I was delighted to learn at the end of the conference that my paper, “PDCUnplugged: A Free Repository of Unplugged Parallel & Distributed Computing Activities” won the Best Paper award! The paper describes PDC Unplugged a searchable curation of unplugged activities related to parallel and distributed computing from the last forty years of the PDC literature. I built PDC Unplugged using Hugo, a static site generator with a very sophisticated taxonomy system that allowed me to classify unplugged activities (and present them to users) in a variety of dimensions. I spent a good chunk of my sabbatical building PDC Unplugged, so I was really delighted to win!