The Real Gabe Blog

Word cloud of this post I mostly do Python and server-related work, so why suddenly a word cloud, in Svelte and JavaScript? I made a mistake in my last post. I didn't know Blogger would use the first image I inserted into my post as the thumbnail picture of my post. This thumbnail picture apprears in both my posts view and when I share my post elsewhere. The first picture in my last post was a screenshot of the Python extension in Visual Studio Code when I discussed how many children mistook that as the Python interpreter. So when I shared my post, it looked like this. This is obviously less than ideal, and it gives an impression that I made a same mistake as the kids. But I had no idea what my thumbnails should look like yet. Word clouds are visually pleasing, although not suitable for statistics. I think they will make good thumbnail pictures for my blog posts for a while, before I come up with a better idea. So I made a small web tool that makes word cloud from a Markdown doc...

People who know me would know that I volunteer at a coding club for young people. They program in Scratch and Python. School is back soon, so it should be a good time to consider what to do for the upcoming term. In particular, I want to think about why Python is not as popular as Scratch at school, and what we as developers volunteering at coding clubs can do about it. One obvious reason Python is disadvantaged is game engines do not provide assets. And we have to be honest, as software development professionals, design skills are not our expertise. It is not just the visual aspect either. In fact, you can see all the aspects of designing a web application in the side bar of Material Design page , but in a nutshell it's visual, audio, interaction, usability and many more. We often leave such design work to specialist UI/UX designers, if we consider such work at all. But what are other things that make Python less considered at school? Python requires installation One thing...

In the last two weeks I've given two one-hour talks to my client, one about Spring Cloud components, the other about a vulnerability scanning tool they were using. They served as knowledge transfer talks as I left them after a three-year commitment. I have been listening to long-form talks throughout my Master's and am still listening today. They often demonstrate the extensive knowledge of the speaker and provide inspiration for my work. I consider long-form talks the most important thing that my Master's tutor got me into, as they still bring my joy long after I graduated. When I talk about "long-form" talks, I usually think of one-hour long talks, although I've seen 45- or 50-minute-long ones where the last few minutes in the hour might be reserved for questions. Such talks are generally tedious to prepare and are sometimes considered deterring. But I believe there is joy for both speakers and listeners in them. I'm not even talking about the ability to...