A friend asked me how one might learn to code, if they’ve never coded before. I rattled off some of the resources I knew about, but promised to send links. And then I realized that, of course, this friend isn’t the only person with this question… So I figured I’d…
The traditional end-of-year blog post is a retrospective and a reflection on the year’s experiences, but I feel like I did some of that with my Thanksgiving post. I realize I missed some stuff, and, sure, I glossed over the negatives of the year, because I was trying to practice…
I’m going to say something I probably shouldn’t (for, indeed, what other purpose do blogs have?), but I hope that doing so will help other people, if they’re having similar issues. My admission: I’ve been feeling like an utter fraud and a complete failure at a significant portion of my…
I’m not the first to post about this, and I hope I won’t be the last. But it’s been bubbling through my consciousness lately, and it has to come out. (Also, blame Andy, with his “librarians don’t blog about big issues” talk.) Maybe this is obvious to everyone, or I’ve…
There’s another side of the story I told in What is a Web Librarian, Anyway?, the guest post I wrote for Letters to a Young Librarian, run by the fabulous Jessica Olin. The story I told there was true, and I stand by it. But it wasn’t the whole story.…
I don’t know if I mentioned, here, that I was signed up to teach “Web Fundamentals” at Anchorage Programming Workshop (“APW,” or “that monthly workshop where women learn to code”), earlier this month. I remember wanting to write a whole post about it, because I was fretting pretty hard about…
I’ve enjoyed the Coursera Python MOOC so far, though I didn’t end up with a local—or even a distance—cohort of people taking it with me. Things have been kind of hectic, both at work and with outside projects and medical stuff, and I ended up doing the homework on Saturday,…
Level up! Anchorage Programming Workshop held its first class last night, on GitHub, and I think it went really well. Besides the two teachers, four people showed up—fewer than we want, long term, but a great start, given that we really hoped to ease into this whole thing, anyway. Their…
About class (and teaching/learning programming): In Week 1 we covered functions, the modulo operator, comparisons, and if/elif/else. They offer a tool called “Pystep,” where you can see functions being evaluated. I am not sure whether it is actually more helpful or more confusing to someone who is unfamiliar with programming,…
I did a hackathon this weekend. (It’s funny. I did a whole lot of work to get skills-based volunteering practiced among librarians, and I ended up doing my first successful SVB as part of the software community, instead. Ah well.) I wasn’t initially planning to participate in this one—something about…
