Makers Acadamy: Wandering in the wild

This week is our last of teaching on the course. After this it is two weeks for a final project and then we are released into the wild. At the end of this week we were meant to know ‘all of the things’. I don’t really feel like that is the case and didn’t get the impression anyone else felt that way either. In fact I can’t think of a time that I knew about quite as much that I didn’t know.

We were working further on our photo sharing site this week. At the beginning I managed to focus moderately well on the task given. To finalise what we needed to know we were introduced to a large number of smaller topics.

Quite a lot of this week I was distracted by other things to read. Micro-services and clojure being the prime suspects. And one particular member of my cohort being more adept at most than providing interesting but most importantly tangential resources to get lost in.

For clojure there is this 15 Min tutorial. After that the clojure toolbox is a treasure trove of links to dozens of interesting clojure project. Another site which I need to investigate for interesting projects is mashape a huge platform for api’s. I also took advantage of some of the downtime to work on a sublime practise page. This is based on the very useful vim tutor.

Finally the most distracting thing was discovering this list of all the packages that I am able to install on my machine with apptitude. The scientific library is amazing. There is code in there to model hadron collisions, population growth and engineering stresses. Every crazy project I have thought about could benefit from these. However I have had to force myself to put those to checking later.