Month: June 2018

I have about 80 mins. On a Saturday. With no kids. And no work. Just me. At home.

What the heck am I supposed to do?!

I do love our school and the teachers and headteacher who work SO hard and do an amazing job, so this is a TINY little problem. But I do wish that there weren’t so many things that parents are invited to or required to be at that are inside regular working hours. 😕

I love these values. Curiosity and creativity are undervalued superpowers. Great read and thanks for sharing, @JosephFreeman https://medium.com/@josephfreeman/what-do-you-value-87b1ff1df2b8

Has anyone yet solved the (first world) problem of getting my smartphone-app-based shopping list to join up with a self-scan-as-you-go supermarket device so scanning an item ticks it off the list and I can see the list on the scanner?!

I swear, my mornings are :

45% asking moving people to be still
45% asking still people to move
10% actually getting things done

More Schoolbot tinkering… Term dates, holidays (calculated from term dates) and meals now all available in messenger, JSON API and a WordPress website using shortcodes. All driven from the same data. 👍

🙌🙌🙌

My wife has been able to walk again for a week.

She actually brings me cups of coffee now!!

😅

In “news from my spare time”, SchoolBot now has an API, and a WordPress plugin that uses it to display into on a website, such as menus and term dates.

Aim: one central “brain” for parent info that can send info to multiple channels: web, chatbot, and, maybe, ultimately print?!

Loving being back in PHPStorm. Static analysis saving me from errors before I even run a test.

This is truly brilliant. Council stop fly posting by sticking “cancelled” stickers over everything. 👏 https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/thinking-fly/1484597

Has anyone yet solved the (first world) problem of getting my smartphone-app-based shopping list to join up with a self-scan-as-you-go supermarket device so scanning an item ticks it off the list and I can see the list on the scanner?!

Interesting to catch a potentially popular petition early stage. Will watch growth with interest: https://petition-track.uk/check-petition/222448

Kinda related: I came across an EXCELLENT podcast on gentleness and activism this week. In fact, both Sarah Corbett and Andy Mort use the term “Gentle” to great effect. Wondering if we need a “gentle developer’s manifesto” to remind us coders to be good to each other.

Huh. So Uncle Bob (not mine – the software engineer guy) got into some trouble with his opinions, huh? I wrote a post as a reaction on one of his posts ages back. It never made it out of draft because I thought “Who am I to criticise this super-experienced dude?”

🤔

Note to self: take a portable fan to your kid’s swimming lesson next week. 😥

Heard the last few mins of Korea/Germany on the radio. Incredible. Watching the replay: kudos to the Korean who set up the second goal. His long range pass was perfect!!

On screen-time: “if a kid is writing programs and creating things that is quite different things happening in their minds than if they are sitting there watching stuff and playing”.

https://rosswintle.uk/2018/06/on-balance-of-creativity-and-passivity-with-kids-and-screentime/

Came across the brilliant-looking CS Unplugged – “Computer science without a computer” resources for teaching kids of all ages the basics of data and computing. All via the brilliant @changelog

https://csunplugged.org/en/

Must really start putting quotes from podcasts on my blog so they’re public rather than in my private notes app . These things are useful for everybody!

Well…this is a nice problem to have!