This is my tableflip post. I promised to write one, so here it is. It’s not very salacious, honestly.
Librarian, developer, engineer, maker, bird nerd
Category: technology
An important piece of internet privacy is under attack, and I’m asking for help protecting it. The EFF explains it well, but short version: every domain (the part of a web address that comes after “www” and includes something like “.org” or “.com” — in the case of this blog,…
Edit, over a month later: Turns out, something very much like the device I was complaining that nobody had designed has since been announced. It’s fairly attractive, can be worn in a number of different ways (no word on its accuracy, though), and it has an inactivity alert. Bonus: it…
I think there are two keys to why I was a successful electrical engineer, when I did not (initially) succeed as a computer scientist—despite being more interested in the latter, to begin with, and despite wanting to pursue the latter now. The first key: invisible struggle, no displays of fallibility…
I started writing my annual changing-of-the-calendar-year post, and I realized I was spilling a lot of virtual ink on, arguably, a pretty small aspect of my year — because, while it’s kind of unimportant, in the scheme of things, it also takes a little explanation. And it’s fun! So, rather…
I thought about writing a really long post about handling Unicode in Python, but, honestly, you should go watch this video; that’s where most of my points would have come from, anyway. (It’s a great video! It’s funny and helpful and relevant, whether you use Python 2 or 3. I…
I had the opportunity, at work (and a bit outside of work), to learn the GitHub API, as wrapped by Python’s github3 module. I found the documentation really hard to follow, maybe because I don’t have a lot of experience reading API docs, or because it wasn’t organized in the…
Look! A short post with just one or two “things learned” in it! Follow-through! :) I’ve rediscovered something more annoying than Unicode (or rather ASCII; I blame ASCII, since we should all be using Unicode, always, at this point) – time.
Three weeks have gone by. I still don’t feel like a real developer, most of the time. But there are glimmers, moments when I do. Usually it’s right after I finish a little script of some sort, or I give a funny name to a variable (while still following PEP 8), or I use a clever shortcut, or I realize I’m writing really opinionated code. There’s that moment of “YES! I am good at this!”
This blog post is a little late. Others have written really evocatively about this subject, already. But, late or not, it feels wrong not to say something. The Ada Initiative is my favorite non-profit (besides perhaps the one I work for? :)). They’re my smile.amazon charity, when I remember to use it. AdaCamp changed my life. And I think sometimes librarians might be inclined to look at the Ada Initiative as “a tech thing,” something not relevant to reference librarians or children’s librarians or school librarians … or really any librarian who doesn’t write code for their job. But Ada doesn’t look at it that way.