I've actually started a number of projects! So far I've got a fair bit to show for them which I'll commit to print in the next few posts. The biggest one I guess is I've set my sites on a career in software development. To this end on advice from fellow nerds (and family) I've signed up on a Java course at City University in London which starts on Friday the 31st.
It's going to be a alot of hard work but having an end goal to shoot for is a good percentage of the battle.
This has meant some fairly drastic life changes such as moving to London from the shire. But that isn't that interesting. More interesting is Python, I've been running through the "Learn Python The Hard Way" online course to learn some programming basics. So far it's been very enjoyable, I've already made a basic and poorly written text adventure like Zork but terrible. At some point I'll put the file up so people can have a look/laugh at my terrible writing and code. I'd like learn as much Python as possible by the time I start my Java course because after that I'm no doubt going to be time poor.
Aside from software I also like playing with hardware and finding new uses for it. In learning Python I decided on the course writers advice to not bother diving into one of the old school text editors that programmers and hackers worship like emacs or vim. Instead I've stuck to what I've been using to write blog notepad++. This has kept me focused on learning the syntax and logic of code and not fighting with new hot-keys, although it does mean I don't yet feel like a 'l33t h4x0r'. However I did want to involve Linux somewhere along the line as I really like the ethos of free software and Linux is probably it's most impressive feat. To this end I decided I'd run my code in Raspbian, on my Raspberry pi.
This turned out to be easy and in my eyes very cool, it turned out I could access my Raspberry pi over my local network (like wi-fi but with wires) using someting called the Secure Shell or SSH. This allows you to remotely access the command line of another computer. The best windows client for this is a programme called puTTY. I also needed a way of transferring the files across the network from Windows to Linux, to do this I used a programme called winSCP. This permitted me to sit upstairs typing code at my desk and when I was ready to test it, transfer it over the network to my pi where I could run it. This is largely pointless, but cool. The best kind of pointless. Good guides to SSH (and much more) with a Raspberry pi can be found here if you're interested in giving it a go.
So far I've been really enjoying mucking about with Python and it hasn't been too hard to learn. I expect that to change soon.
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