Is This Thing On?

I’m glad to see gender diversity on the rise in software development: non-male respondents increased by 4% in 2017 vs. 2016: http://bit.ly/gowomendevs

I gave a talk on this subject to the first ever Code Fellows class, in Seattle last Friday.  Here’s the slide deck, hope you like it.

I’ve been learning the basics of these programming languages and development platforms lately. I’m impressed with the huge Rails movement, and Django seems like a very cool project. Both platforms allow web sites to be built at an incredible pace.

Both Ruby and Python appear to be relatively straightforward. But I must say that at this still-early stage in my learning, Python wins for simplicity and ease. Ruby’s “code blocks” are a bit obtuse, as example reasoning.

From what I currently understand about Rails and Django, their strengths lie in auto-generated code whether the implementation be application-supporting code derived from database schema (Rails) or database schema derived from application code (Django). Microsoft’s LINQ, which we’ve been using a bit at work, is similar but not foundational to the platform. It’s all cool stuff that makes DBAs anxious, which is always fun.

After trying to test out Google’s AdWords client API using their supplied code samples, finding that those code samples require old libraries that the latest Python release doesn’t support, and realizing that Django itself won’t support the latest version of Python (3.0) for a year or more to come, I’m wondering what it would be like to have a wonderfully supported and rich platform like Rails tooled with a simple and evolved language like Python.

Now I’m wondering what I’m going to have for dinner. I’ll probably get more mileage out of this wonderment.

A number of years ago I was employed as an audio technician, and had the wonderful opportunity to travel around the country, recording people say interesting things. Out of all the events that I got to attend, TED was my absolute favorite. I’d come home boiling over with inspiration and enthusiasm for technology. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out some of the video that they’ve graciously made available for free. I just watched a very cool clip with Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry about MIT’s “Sixth Sense”.