Tons of Homework!
I feel like I’m in school. I’m not, but I might as well be. Here are the courses I’m taking.
Wonderland 101 – After building and running Wonderland 0.5-dev3, I found some, um, rough edges definitely. No telling yet if it is mistakes I’m making or problems in the code, but most likely it is a combination. To untangle which is which, and figure out what I might do to help, I need to read the specifications and other technical articles and tutorials for Releasepoint5. It is a lot to read, but I’m excited about the module system. I think that after I read all those docs, I might be able to pick one module that I’m particularly interested in to focus on understanding and testing, and ignore the fact that other things are in various stages of development. On the mailing list, a core developer recently replied to a question about a particular module saying yes, we think there is a problem there but wont have time to get to it for a while, if you can dig in and figure out what is wrong, will be greatly appreciated.
AMEE – I’ve already read the entire website (which was relaunched last week and looks so much better now!) and downloaded, customized and built a working version of their demo carbon calculator. After talking with Gavin at ETech, I understand better that AMEE is a platform, and they don’t really want or need a large developer community for the platform project itself, but rather they need a large ecosystem of companies and developers building creative & compelling tools that use that platform in the background. So my current assignment in this “class” is to study and understand all of the AMEE Affiliates. Working for AMEE directly would be a dream job for me, but if that does not happen, might I work for one of their Affiliates? (Not counting my former employer.) That is what I need to study.
Objects First – I’ve worked through Part 1, it was great fun, I’m now doing Part 2. And I will return to the half-dozen or so exercises in Part 1 that I skipped because they were just going to give me more practice that I did not really need, and I had had enough already of that subject and wanted to move on. But I will return later and do them all so that I will be able to claim to have done every single problem in the book. I have a guinea pig student picked out, and am scheming with her mother before we pitch the idea to her. If that does not work out though, I have other ideas of where to find a student or two, to teach for free or for a very low rate since tutoring would be a learning experience for us both.
WordPress 101 – I love this “class” and I really just stumbled into it when I researched where to blog and concluded I should install WordPress on our family website. It was really easy and fun to customize, although I’m not really done. It got good enough and I stopped (bad me) but I really need to finish up customizing (the right nav bar for example is still pretty much the default) and install some more plugins. WordPress seems to have a really large community of enthusiastic users, and there is a whole sub-community around using WordPress as a CMS (content management system) which looks so easy it makes me want to start setting up websites in my spare time. (ha) My homework here is to finish customizing this blog and then set up a simple website where mere mortals could update the content.
Those are my core classes, which are really enough fun for one person, but I have two more:
Exercise Daily – with the help of sparkpeople.com. They recently came out with the google maps app that I’ve been wishing for: one where I can map my walks, whether or not they stick to roads, and have the distance, speed, and calories (for walk/run or bike) calculated automatically! The only missing feature in this awesome app, Run Tracking from SparkPeople.com, is the ability to edit an existing route. I’d like to edit my route when I realize I’ve made a mistake, and I’d like to be able to make a new route that is a variation on an existing route without entering all the points in by hand again. Hopefully Edit is such an obvious feature to add that they will do it before long. I think the app is new, not just newly discovered by moi.
Littérature Jeunesse – for which I’m currently (still!) reading Harry Potter et le Prisonnier d’Azkaban. It isn’t that I read at a snail’s pace, even in French, but that I don’t indulge myself in this class very often. It really is a fun read, and it is different in French. Fortunately no one at the library has put a request in for the book, so I can just keep renewing it until I finish. Then on to Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, though I think I’d better re-read Around the World in Eighty Days first, since I cannot even remember how old I was when I first read it. At least that should be a quick read.
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