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Career What I’m Up To

The Great LinkedIn Premium experiment

Image: Dee Dee from “Dexter’s Laboratory” pressing a button with the LinkIn logo on it
Ooh! What does this button do?

I decided to see if LinkedIn Premium will help with the job search and activated the one month free trial. I’ll keep you posted by writing about the features I find and my experiences with it.

Categories
Current Events Programming What I’m Up To

I’m teaching an online Python programming course!

Photo: Man’s hand on Mac laptop, with Python book on the side. Caption: “Intro to Python course / Starts this Monday!”

Graohic: Computer Coach Training Center logoI’ll be teaching a live online course on Python programming on behalf of Computer Coach Training Center starting Monday. Here are the details:

  • What: Intro to Python Coding course
  • When: Monday and Wednesday evenings, 6:00 – 10:00 p.m., starting Monday, July 13 and ending Wednesday, August 12 (6 weeks, twice a week)
  • Where: Online.
  • How much: $900 — and Computer Coach has grants that can cover the cost if you’re unemployed and based in the Tampa Bay area (contact them to see if you qualify)
  • What you’ll need:
    • A computer that was made sometime in the last ten years. My main computer is a 2014-era MacBook Pro, but I’ll be doing demonstrations on a 2012-era Lenovo ThinkPad running Linux Mint, a 2009-era Compaq laptop running Peppermint Linux, and a $35 Raspberry Pi.
    • An internet connection. This is an online course, after all.

To register for this course, visit this page and tap the Attend Online button. Someone from Computer Coach will contact you.

Screenshot: The Meetup page for the Python course, with the “Attend online” button highlighted.

The course description

Photo: Woman’s hands typing on Mac laptop.

This is an introduction to the Python programming language. Now in the top 10 programming languages according to the TIOBE Programming Language Index, it is versatile enough to have a wide array of uses, from simple scripting to powering Instagram, Spotify, Netflix, Dropbox, and more. Its combination of simplicity and vast scientific and math libraries have made it the preferred programming language for data science and machine learning. If you’re looking for a first programming language, Python is an excellent choice.

 

This is not a passive course! This isn’t the kind of course where the instructor lectures over slides while you take notes (or pretend to take notes while surfing the web or checking your social media feeds). In this course, you’ll be actively taking part in the learning process, entering code, experimenting, making mistakes, correcting those mistakes, and producing working applications. You will learn by doing. At the end of each session, you’ll have a collection of little Python programs that you wrote, and which you can use as the basis for your own work.

The course will start at the most basic level by walking you through the process of downloading and installing the necessary tools to start Python programming. From there, you’ll learn the building blocks of the Python programming language:

  • Control structures that determine what your programs do,
  • Data structures to store the information that your programs act on,
  • Functions and objects to organize your code, and
  • Using libraries as building blocks for your applications.

You’ll write all sorts of programs…

  • You’ll use Python in “immediate mode” to perform quick calculations (and you’ll sharpen your command-line skills in the process).
  • You’ll write scripts to simplify or automate tedious tasks.
  • You’ll build web applications.
  • And since it’s a networked, data-driven world where no application is an island, you’ll learn how to use Python to interact with web services and databases.

Better still, you’ll learn how to think like a programmer. You’ll learn how to look at a goal and learn how you could write a program to meet it, and how that program could be improved or enhanced. You’ll learn skills that will serve you well as you take up other programming languages, and even learn a little bit about the inner workings of computers, operating systems, and the internet.

 

Categories
Current Events Programming What I’m Up To

RW Community Care: Free community support for mobile developers (and aspiring mobile developers, too!)

One of the reasons I write for raywenderlich.com — the premier mobile developer tutorial site — is that they’re wonderful people to work with, because they’re such good people. And as good people, they’ve put together something to help developers during this time of pandemic and quarantine: RW Community Care. It’s a series of office hours, livestreams, bootcamps, and more, running until August 22 — and all events are 100% free!

Here’s what RW Community care offers…

Read iOS Apprentice for free!

Cover of “iOS Apprentice, 8th edition”I learned iOS programming back in 2012 by reading and doing the exercises in an earlier edition of iOS Apprentice, which was written by Matthijs Hollemans. While I’d done some mobile development as a Windows Phone Champ during my time as a developer evangelist at Microsoft, it was this book that set me on my path as a mobile developer.

I owe a lot to this book, which is why it was a big honor to co-author the eighth edition with Eli Ganim. For the summer, you can read it online for free at RW Community Care. Whether you’re completely new to programming or — like me, back in 2012, experienced at programming but new to iOS development — you should check out iOS Apprentice on RW Community Care!

RW Talks

RW Talks happen weekly, cover all sorts of topics that mobile developers will find interesting, ranging from the deeply technical to the inspiring. Upcoming talks include:

You can also see past talks:

RW Chat

Can’t attend some of the other live events, or prefer to collaborate on discussions as a community? Or maybe you’re more the type to hash out challenges or problems with a group of like-minded developers? There’s a Discord server that you can join!

Office Hours

Not everyone has easy access to a senior mobile developer, especially when everyone seems so busy these days and our teams are more physically separate then ever before.

Good news: Office Hours are the next best thing to having a senior developer right next to you!

Review My Stuff

Want a senior member of the development community to look over your current project, run a critical eye over your professional résumé, or review some code you’ve been struggling with? This program is designed to do just that.

If you need someone to help you with deeper questions on your particular project, or to lend a critical eye to your resume or job search, you need Review My Stuff!

 

Categories
Hardware Programming What I’m Up To

New life for old computers

The current coronavirus pandemic has given me a chance to do some spring cleaning at home, which in turn led me to revive some old computers that have been sitting idly in a closet. I figure I could put them to work doing interesting things.

Compaq 610 (2009-era 4GB Core 2 Duo)

Installing Peppermint on the Compaq 610.

I’ve given an old Compaq 610 a new lease on life with Peppermint OS, a lightweight Linux distro that runs really well on old machines (the Compaq is a 2009-era machine with a Core 2 Duo processor). I also installed VS Code, Node, Anaconda, and React on it, making it a lean, mean machine for that upcoming Python course I’m teaching.

My very erudite makeshift monitor stand.

In the process, I also gave some old Smalltalk-80 books a new purpose as well: propping up the monitor that goes with the Compaq.

ThinkPad T430 (2012-era 16GB Core i5)

Preparing class notes (using Jupyter notebooks) for my upcoming Python course on the ThinkPad.

I replaced the CMOS battery on my trusty ThinkPad T430 and its older version of Ubuntu with Linux Mint. Its own internal wifi card finally died, and I simply decided to simply replace it with a faster USB wifi adapter that would arrive the next day instead of getting the slower internal card that could take as long as 6 weeks to arrive.

As with the Compaq, I set up the ThinkPad with VS Code, Node, Anaconda, and React. Since it’s got the processor power and 16 GB RAM, I also put Android Studio 4 and Flutter on it. Between some mobile projects in my near future, and the need to have a machine for running servers and other automated tasks, it’s going to prove to be quite useful.

That leaves me with one last machine to update.

Raspberry Pi 3 B (2016-era 1GB ARM A53)

My Raspberry Pi, as it was back in 2016.

I got the Raspberry Pi 3 4 years ago as my one impulse purchase on Amazon Prime Day 2016 (in mid-July of that year), and made regular use of it until around early 2018, when I used it for a Sonic Pi programming demo. It was high time to bring it back to active duty.

The Raspberry Pi’s “hard drive” is actually a microSD card that fits into an easily-accessed slot near one of the edges of the board. The process of updating the Pi’s OS is pretty simple: You use the Raspberry Pi imager on another computer with an SD card slot (and a microSD-to-standard SD card adapter) to rewrite its contents.

The Raspberry Pi is a pretty good Python machine, and I may end up using it while teaching that Python course, if only to show what’s possible on a computer that’s smaller than a deck of cards (when it’s not in a case) that you can get for about $50.

Since it’s powered by an ARM chip, it offers an opportunity for a kind of programming that most other machines don’t offer: ARM assembly programming!

The actual code from the first assembly program I wrote on my newly-reformatted Raspberry Pi: A “Tiger King”-themed version of “Hello World”.

It looks like it’s going to become an ARM-based world:

  • ARM-based chips power IoT devices,
  • Smartphones are generally powered by ARM-based chips, and
  • Apple’s upcoming switch from Intel x86-based chips to their own ARM-based silicon is likely have wide-ranging impact across the PC industry.

With this upcoming sea change, it doesn’t hurt to have some familiarity with ARM assembly language. Even though smartphones have ARM chips, the Raspberry Pi is a much better platform on which to learn ARM assembly, as it allows you to do development and execution in the same place.

It may have been a while since I’ve done assembly language programming — first on the 6502 in high school on Apple ][s and Commodore PETs, and later in university on NS32000 boards connected to Digital Unix machines — but I found my return pretty simple. It didn’t take long for me to cobble together a “Hello World!”-style app on the Pi.

Watch this blog for ARM assembly tutorials!

Categories
Hardware What I’m Up To

The dirty little secret about the ThinkPad T430’s CMOS battery

I’ve hung onto an old Lenovo ThinkPad T430 that’s been performing yeoman’s service over the past few years as a trusty Linux development machine and server. Its CMOS battery finally ran out, which meant that it no longer kept proper time when removed from power, which meant that I always got this message on startup:

I’m going to be teaching a Python course in the evenings in a matter of days, and wanted to be have the ThinkPad loaded up with Linux Mint 19.3 and Anaconda Individual Edition for that purpose. Without much thought and some very quick Googling, I found that Amazon could get a replacement battery to me the next day for less than ten bucks. Sold!

As promised, it arrived the next day. Here’s the box it came in:

I’m not complaining. There are all sorts of economics-based reasons for shipping something so tiny in that size box, and I’m grateful for the huge “crumple zone” provided by that box.

I knew where the battery went, thanks to an earlier adventure in which I upgraded the T430’s RAM (which requires you to do so in two separate locations on the machine). It’s under the central panel on the underside of the machine:

Replacing the battery was a snap: Disconnect the old battery’s connector, and then attach the the new battery in the same way.

I got curious. What was under the yellow protective plastic cover?

I peeled it off the old battery and found this:

The yellow protector concealed a run-of-the-mill CR2032 3-volt “coin”-type battery, and nothing more. The remote for my BOSE speakers uses one, as does my hand-held luggage scale. They also power the light on proctoscopes, in case you were wondering what kind of batteries yours took:

You can buy them in 5-packs at your local drug store, and their unit price comes to about 50 cents each.

I have a bunch of them in my drawer, and could’ve simply taken the connector from my dead battery and taped it to a fresh one. The red lead goes to the battery’s + side, while the black lead goes to its – side:

The money doesn’t bug me as much as the missed DIY opportunity, even if it was an incredibly minor one. I’m posting this for the benefit of anyone who has to replace a CMOS battery soon: You can do it without shelling out for an “official” battery!

 

Categories
What I’m Up To

A delightful find while researching my new industry

Lately, I’ve spent lunch reading up on the industry in which in work:

Tap the photo to see it at full size.

Before you say “Wait a minute — don’t you work in the software/mobile app/IT industry?”, let me make it clear. I work in the beverage alcohol industry; I just happen to do that work with software.

While flipping through the pages, looking for the Using Narrative to Win on Menus article, I stumbled across this full-page ad:

Tap the photo to see it at full size.

It’s a full-page ad for Lilypad, which is the name of both the company I work for and the beverage alcohol software suite it produces, which includes the mobile app, which I work on. I’ve worked on all sorts of software before, but never for something that has its own full-page ad in an industry magazine.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Categories
Programming What I’m Up To

I’m building 20 projects in 2020!

Photo: 20 Projects in 2020, featuring a white Apple Watch and White iPhone outdoors on a wooden picnic table.

Here’s my personal challenge for this year: I will try to complete at least 20 small software projects in 2020 and document them here on Global Nerdy. The number of projects I’ve chosen to attempt this year comes straight from the way the year is commonly pronounced: twenty-twenty.

Why am I doing this? Because now that I’m back to writing code for a living — after a good long period of time as a product manager or owner, a developer evangelist, or a marketer — and I want to up my game. Yes, I’ll get lots of practice at work, but as those of you who code for a living know, the projects you do at work tend to focus on a narrow segment of what’s possible with code, and largely about solving a business problem instead of learning a new technology, language, or skill.

There’s also another reason: quantity leads to quality.

Photo: Cover of “Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking” by David Bayles and Ted Orland.

There’s a pretty good chance that you’ve heard the “ceramics class quantity vs. quality” story. It’s from the book Art & Fear: Oberservations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking, and it’s appeared many times over the past couple of decades on sites that techies are likely to read. In Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly included it in a list of excerpts from the book way back in 2003, Jeff Atwood wrote about it in Coding Horror in 2008, then Jason Kottke wrote about it in 2009, Ben Thompson cited it in Stratechery in 2015 when writing about Buzzfeed’s success, and in 2016, it’s referred to in a Hackernoon post.

Here’s the story, with emphasis added by me:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Here’s Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood’s take-away from this story:

Quantity always trumps quality. That’s why the one bit of advice I always give aspiring bloggers is to pick a schedule and stick with it. It’s the only advice that matters, because until you’ve mentally committed to doing it over and over, you will not improve. You can’t.

When it comes to software, the same rule applies. If you aren’t building, you aren’t learning. Rather than agonizing over whether you’re building the right thing, just build it. And if that one doesn’t work, keep building until you get one that does.

In short, it boils down to the old adage “Practice makes perfect,” or more accurately, “Practice makes progress.”

Most of these projects will be built for “toy” systems: mobile devices, wearables, the Raspberry Pi and set-top boxes. I’ve made this choice for a number of reasons:

  1. I got an Apple Watch for Christmas! Sure, it does neat things like track my exercise and tell the time, but the real reason I got it was to write apps for it.
  2. “Toy” projects allow me to constrain them so that they don’t take an excessive amount of time to build, which is key when you aim to put together 20 projects in a year.
  3. My day-to-day work is mobile development. Anything that makes me better at it is a good thing.
  4. I need topics for my meetup, Tampa iOS Meetup. Yup, that’s making a grand comeback shortly.
  5. I’ve already got an interesting side project that involves the Apple Watch.
  6. I also got a mini-screen for my Raspberry Pi, which has been neglected as of late.

6. Finally, and most importantly, I’m doubling down on the philosophy that I talked about on The 6-Figure Developer podcast: “Always bet on the toy.”

Creative Commons photo by Chris Cox. Tap to see the source.

Chris Dixon wrote about this ten years ago in an article titled The next big thing will start out looking like a toy. Here are the opening paragraphs:

One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago.  It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”  This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype. (Christensen has many more examples in his books).

He also points out that something being toy-like doesn’t necessarily mean that it will become the next big thing. He’s saying that initially they seem like toys, but due to external forces, they become useful in ways that seem obvious in hindsight but invisible at the time. It’s yet another example of William Gibson’s cyberpunk maxim: “The street finds its own uses for things.”

Dixon closes his article about the next big thing being a toy with this paragraph, which mentions the new decade:

But startups with sustaining technologies are very unlikely to be the new ones we see on top lists in 2020. Those will be disruptive technologies – the ones that sneak by because people dismiss them as toys.

Watch this space as I post about these projects throughout 2020! The first — a simple Apple Watch app that’s also a “How to write an Apple Watch app” article in disguise — will be here on Global Nerdy soon.