SIGAVDI #39: Bird and Book Edition

Hello friends,

It’s been a couple weeks. I just got back from visiting Jessica Kerr in St. Louis. We saw the St. Louis City Museum, which I can only describe as like crawling around inside Neil Gaiman’s mind.

We also recorded some live coding videos in which we, as two aging mostly-backend developers attempt to create a new web application using modern JavaScript technologies. While drinking beer. They were a lot of fun to make. Let me know if you’d like to see more video in this vein.

One thing those pairing sessions reinforced: we really, really like Glitch. It’s a phenomenal leveling technology. It removes a number of barriers to learning to code web apps. You don’t have to figure out hosting, or understand version control (but it keeps a history and exports to Github!).

On the other hand, it doesn’t insulate you from file structure, so you won’t be totally at sea when you do start working from a local development environment.

Another data point: I have a friend I’m helping learn to code and she was able to construct her first website in Glitch on her phone. A lot of people don’t have reliable access to a computer, so that’s kind of a big deal.

Oh yeah, we also recorded a Greater Than Code episode with Jean-François Cloutier. Go check out his video about building learning robots in Elixir, it’s great.

OK let’s see what I got done. This is kind of dated, but…

  • Make sure the January 7 episode gets out the door.
  • Finish unpacking from Australia (seriously it’s getting embarrassing at this point)
  • Catch up on the my assistant’s daily briefings (bad llama)
  • Catch up on email AGAIN (frickin’ holidays)
  • Prep a RubyTapas freebie because it’s been way too long.
  • Make SIGAVDI easier to sign up for.

The plan for the rest of this week:

  • Submit a talk proposal to NordicJS (and use this as a pull to get my ducks in a row for talk submissions – update bio, abstracts, talk history page).
  • Make sure I’m on top of at least the next two RubyTapas episodes.
  • Make plans for the upcoming Cohere/ShipRise Smoky Mountain Retreat. We’ll be working on the AsyncJS course and other plots & plans. What do I need to do to prep?
  • Reimplement Promises in Ruby, again, based on the A+ spec. Mostly because I feel like it, and it feeds into some RubyTapas scripts, I’ve been writing, as well as into improving my understanding for the AsyncJS course.

OK, I know this is short on pontification this week, but I’m late and I feel like it’s most important to keep the habit going.

Talk to you soon!