I’ll assume you know raw JavaScript and a little raw Node. Enough JavaScript to be familiar with the DOM, anonymous functions, and callbacks. You dont have to know React or anything of the sort.

First up, Learn enough to recognise the new syntaxes in ES2016, along with promises, arrow functions, generators and async await. You don’t have to be good at them; just be able to know how to read them.

Now learn enough Node and NPM to start a vanilla Express server and realise how much work it would be to write a whole fully featured web application in it.

Now quit jQuery, cold turkey.

If you come from using a Rails-like framework such as Rails, Django or Laravel, the though of scouring NPM for all the packages you’ll need, you’ll be wanting someone to make opinionated decisions about the right packages for the job for you. May I suggest Adonis.js. It comes with all the MVC, Authentication and ActiveRecord stuff you’re used to, along with loads of other good stuff too. You’ll have a good reason to learn about Generators, Promises and async await here.

Resist the urge to jQuery.

If you want to write your front end as a single page application (SPA), to run in front of your API, you could use what you’re familiar with, or you can start afresh with Vue.js because it has the gentlest learning curve of any of the mainline frameworks, all the best stuff from the other frameworks, and you don’t even have to learn a bundled/compiler if you don’t need it.

Vue is easy to learn, easy to adopt, and you’re never forced into complicating things too early. Go at your own pace, and eventually you’ll learn about components, which will change everything. Get started with Vue’s single file components and never look back.

With Vue, you don’t need a router out of the box, until you know you do. You also don’t need state storage until you know you do.

You want to write a universal app, or use Material design you can do that when you want. Heck, you can even bring in JSX if you’re feeling that. And you dont have to add any of these packages to your project, until you need it, and in any order.

tl;dr: Learn enough JS and Node to spot new JS language constructs, starting with Adonis will give you a reason to learn the new stuff while giving you an easier path to success.

Disagree? Got a easier, faster path to productivity and learning all this crazy JS? Chime in below, or hit me up: @Glutnix on Twitter.

Discovery

I had never been to WellyCon before, but others had told me about it a few years ago. Only three weeks before the event, I saw it advertised in the ComicCon New Zealand flyer. Apparently all the big NZ geek events were running on the same weekend: Queen’s Birthday weekend.

The bigger, more well-known geek event, also running Queen’s Birthday weekend was Armageddon Expo, the annual entertainment and pop culture event. I’ve been to Armageddon many times (even cosplaying as Gordon Freeman and Axe Cop), but found it less and less to my liking, as it focussed on cartoons, television and cinema, and less about video games and board games.

I asked my lovely wife for the privilege of going to just the Saturday of WellyCon, leaving her with our daughter. Lucky is the man whose wife lets him go to WellyCon without her!

A Community Mindset

Because I was going by myself, I wondered how games got started at WellyCon. It turns out that there’s a very large game library at WellyCon. It’s full of games brought along by other attendees and left to be played by others. You can rustle up a group, choose a game, claim a table, set up and start playing.

I wasn’t expecting to know many people there, and I wasn’t going as part of a group, so I decided to only join games looking for extra players. As it turns out, they have these big signs you can put on your table to make it easy for players like me to find your table.

Turning Up

There was plenty of parking at Wellington Girls in Thorndon, if you knew where to find it. I circled around before I found the tiny WellyCon sign leading in to the parking field.

Once through the door, I walked around the busy atrium, admiring the magnificent stack of board games, and spotting one of the signs, and jumping into a game of Star Wars Carcassonne.

Star Wars Carcassonne is a lighter version of the original Carcassonne where cities are asteroid fields, roads are trade routes, no farms (space is empty) and cloisters are planets, and a fun planet-conquering mechanic which lets you roll battle dice to steal them. None of us had played this variant, and one of us had never played a Carcassonne. We read the rules, and learned how to play, and enjoyed ourselves very much. And I won, which is nice.

Family Jewels

Half-way through the first game, I got a text message from Adrianne, one of the organisers of WellyCon informing me that I had won a spot prize. After my game, I went to claim my prize.

Choosing from almost 90 prizes, I selected a set of plastic gems and gold nuggets for playing Splendor with. They are beautiful and decadent, and must add a further tactile experience to the game. I should not that at this point, I have played a lot of Splendor on my mobile phone, but did not own a physical copy of Splendor.

Much Game. Very Lose. Wow.

I ended up playing Shadows over Camelot with the same two people (Caleb and Fiona) and two other people. The traitor won by sabotaging too many quests, then falsely accusing another player to end the game. We didn’t complete a single quest. Fun game though!

Shadows of Camelot! #wellycon pic.twitter.com/CE9dYMlcxm

— Brett Taylor (@Glutnix) June 4, 2016

After publically not collecting my lunch, and then correcting, and consuming it, I played a game of Splendor with some older gamers (not revealing my gem stash), and was thoroughly trounced. I got locked out of the ruby market, losing a lot of tempo in the process. I did, however, remind all those players that you can reserve a face-down card from any of the three stocks.

Trading Post

I had brought with me a selection of my least played games, hoping to trade them for slightly better games. WellyCon hosts a trading corner, where you can leave your games on a silent auction or for sale. I missed the (seemingly non-existent) face to face trading session at 12:30, but put all my games in a box marked “Offers” and waited for calls. Maybe not a great strategy, but I did get a call or two, settling one deal that day.

For the Hoard

I finally got a copy to go with the plastic gems I won

Walking around I spotted a demo table with Cheeky Parrot Games showing off their Kickstarter card game Hoard, which I had already seen online. I sat down and played a full game with Tim Kings-Lynne, one of the game’s designers, and Julia Schiller, Director of Cheeky Parrot Games. They’re lovely people, and maybe they let me beat them at their own game. I got to talking to Tim and his exploits on the Miramar Peninsula working at Weta Digital, how the game has developed, and thoroughly enjoyed myself for a good while there.

After this I hung out with my old buddy Chris and Mel for a while, catching up on old games and old times. He also convinced me to put my games on silent auction. We then sat down and they introduced me to Codenames. Being the code master is hard! We played three games before I had to leave for the night and rejoin my family.

Last Dash for Cash

Before I left, I closed a trade! I traded a copy of Power Grid along with the China/Korea map expansion for $40. And on the way out, I passed by the Cerberus Games booth and spotted a copy of Splendor that had not been there all day, which I swiftly secured and took home.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself that day. Playing five different games, most of which I had never played before. I made new friends, won prizes, sold games at auction, caught up with old friends, and bought a game I have wanted for a while.

You should go to WellyCon!

Will I return for WellyCon 10 next year? ABSOLUTELY. My wife is supremely sore she missed out.

Should you? If you have enjoy learning and playing new and interesting board games, Definitely! And I learned there is a Mini-WellyCon coming up, maybe Labour Weekend? See you there?

The Laravel 5.1 documentation’s approach to sharing data with every view works for most circumstances, but I recently learned of a case where it breaks things: running artisan.

The problem

The documented approach to sharing data with all views tells us to add code to AppServiceProvider->boot():

class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    public function boot()
    {
        view()->share('key', 'value');
    }
}

This approach is fine, for certain values.

view()->share('siteName', 'Banana Bill's Boat Boutique');
````

Literal values won't be a problem.

```php
view()->share('currentUser', Auth::user());

Here, if someone’s logged in, Auth:user() will be an instance of the User model. If not, it’ll be null. No problem here either.

view()->share('openingHours', OpeningHours::currentHours());

Here’s our problem. We’re asking the OpeningHours model to get the current opening hours. And most of the time, this will work. However, if you haven’t run your migrations yet, your pages will give you an SQL error saying the opening_hours table is missing.

And so you get the hint and run your migrations to create the table. php artisan migrate…

…and you get the same error. You say to the computer “I’m trying to make the table right now! Lay off!”. But no dice, you continue to get the same error.

The issue here is that everything in AppServiceProvider->boot() runs even when you run artisan commands. It’s not normally an issue, but if you’re a new developer installing a project on your dev machine for the first time, this could really throw you.

The solution

Create a new service provider and have that create a View Composer for us instead.

In the example above, we’d comment out our share command, and we’ll get the use of artisan back:

php artisan make:provider ViewComposerServiceProvider

This will create /app/Providers/ViewComposerServiceProvider.php

Add the new service provider to /config/app.php‘s providers array:

    'providers' => [
        ...
        App\Providers\RouteServiceProvider::class,
        ...
    ]

And then in ViewComposerServiceProvider->boot() create a view composer:

    public function boot()
    {
        View::composer('*', function($view)
        {
            $view->with('openingHours', OpeningHours::currentHours());
        });
    }

ViewComposerServiceProvider->boot() will still be called when you invoke artisan, but OpeningHours::currentHours() will only be called when you a view is created. Now your app won’t break during a first time deployment. Hooray!

TL;DR view()->share() with models works great until your database isn’t there. Use view composers instead.

No doubt about it, Cave Story is one of the best games ever made.

This video is pretty spoiler-heavy, so if you’ve not played Cave Story, there’s a freeware version that’s been ported to almost everything, and if you want it on Steam, Nintendo 3DS, or other shops, you can pay for it too. The freeware version along with the fan translation is still the best choice though.

Kero Blaster is an excellent game, extremely fun and rewarding, and doesn’t artificially lengthen playtime. For those who still couldn’t get enough, a New Game+ mode made it harder.

The iOS version of Pink Heaven will be released on October 11. Pixel is also giving Kero Blaster an update on the same day, adding ZANGYOU MODE (‘Overtime’ Mode). 

2015年10月11日2DアクションゲームKeroBlasterに「残業モード」が追加、アップデートされます｜ #ケロブラスター #KeroBlaster pic.twitter.com/oKy07SzoPe

— studiopixel.jp (@StudioPixelJP) September 18, 2015

Because of the update, Studio Pixel is bumping the prices of the game up a buck or two, so go get the game while you still can!

• Pink Hour for Windows – Free
• Pink Hour for iOS – Free
• Pink Heaven for Windows – Free
• Pink Heaven for iOS – coming soon
• Kero Blaster for Windows – USD $7.99 until 11 Oct 2015
• Kero Blaster for iOS – USD $4.99 / NZD $6.49 until 11 Oct 2015

Long live This is My Jam.

All fixed!

I think the Venusian gangster rap in GUN GODZ, like most people, is pretty flippin fantastic. I couldn’t find the lyrics for the main theme anywhere, so I did my best to figure out what these G’s are saying, and post it here as a thank you to Vlambeer. You guys are awesome.

GUN GODZ Main Theme – Kozilek feat. Doseone

[“snoop”]
i got-
i got guns

[the man nun]
i got gun for picnic
it’s gun that send texts
it’s gun that make breakfast
gun that sign breasts
it’s gun that straight faced
gun with six senses
it’s gun that hate texas
gun that wear vests

two clips of hollow tip
‘pon glock and ‘pon hip
ka-click your flesh rip
my clique been rooted
pull pin and then hold this
black out this horseshit
brains blow and whole tits
these cats can get fixed
(pop) shoot you know dick (pop pop pop)
with authentic gun from my sock (pop pop pop)
it meanted somebody got shot (pop pop pop pop pop)
by the nun man who run with the godz of the gunz

[“snoop”]
g-guns for fake necklaces
guns that send texts
it’s guns that make breakfast
guns that sign breasts
it’s guns that straight faced
guns with six senses
guns that hate texas
guns that wear vests

[the man nun]
i got gun for picnic
it’s gun that send texts
it’s gun that make breakfast
gun that sign breasts
it’s gun that straight faced
gun with six senses
gun that hate texas
gun that wear vests

[“snoop”]
i got guns for fake necklaces
guns that send texts
it’s guns that make breakfast
guns that sign breasts
it’s guns that straight faced
guns with six senses
guns that hate texas
guns that wear vests

[instrumental]

[the man nun]
we’ve got proof and then shoot
we bull proof then pull chute
we knife-proof and nine-shoot
we bomb-proof
your mom’s shot by a gun of the god

[breakdown]

we’ve got proof and then shoot
we bull proof and pull chute
we knife-proof and nine-shoot
we bomb-proof
your mom’s shot

[“snoop”]
one for the money
two’s for the crew
three’s for shooting anything i want to

[reggae break]

[“snoop”]
ash-a clack clack
bullet

bulletproof
yeah one two
you never shouldn’t shoot
a hundred-one hole-in-the-roof
ventilating your new god z suit
you midget doo-doo
we’ve the fittin’ ta mash you
bitchin’ the fat, little kids in the back
you on my pisslist like white girl rhymes
your mighty ducks hat
you’re rockin’, you’re mad
with a chest strapped
clack clack

There are two distinct voices on this track, so I’m calling the one that features on the rest of the album the rapper Doseone, and the one that sounds like Snoop Dogg/Lion “Snoop”, though I’m starting to think that Doseone and Kozilek have a gun for fake guest rappers.

After a twitter conversation with doseone, the “character” rapping first is “theNunMan”, confirmed by his (“Mr.One”) post on Venus Patrol.

Games released in 2012

1. Waking Mars
2. Beat Sneak Bandit
3. Punch Quest
4. WarGames: WOPR
5. Spell Rift
6. Letterpress / PuzzleJuice / SpellTower / Wordament – 2012 turned out to be Year of Reinvention of the Word Game.
7. 10000000
8. Super Hexagon
9. Kingdom Rush
10. Pudding Monsters
11. Super Monsters Ate My Condo
12. OLO
13. Spaceteam
14. Squids Wild West
15. Where’s My Perry?
16. Toybox
17. Super Crate Box
18. Blockwick / Blockwick 101
19. Rune Raiders
20. Bad Piggies

Oldies but Continued Goodies

1. Gesundheit
2. Contre Jour
3. Where’s My Water?
4. Cut the Rope / Cut the Rope: Experiments
5. Squids
6. Gauge
7. Frotz
8. Carcassonne
9. ASYNC Corp.
10. Trainyard

Honourable Mentions

1. McPixel
2. Whale Trail
3. Mole Escape
4. Polymer
5. Lost Cities

So, pop these on and chip out!

And if that’s not enough ghost chips of Christmas present for you, @hubs curates a exhaustive list of even more Chiptune Christmas, a lot of which is free too. Wow.

And when your family tells you to turn it off, then turn on Mariah’s two albums. Cause Mariah is retro enough by now

Peace to you and yours this Christmas!

• Jamestown
• Bit.Trip Runner
• Super Meat Boy
• Shank
• NightSky HD

Pay more than the current average to get Gratuitous Space Battles and Cave Story+!

Cave Story+ and Super Meat Boy are seriously good games, and each on their own is worth the price of admission. And you get to decide that price! I’m not kidding. Go buy these great video games NOW, even if you don’t have time to play them right now. Support some really good charities while you do.

UPDATE: five extra games were added this morning: VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves, Hammerfight, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Cogs. And every game in the bundle also now comes with its soundtrack for you to add to your music collection. Only seven days left

Mac OS X Lion’s Finder introduces two ways to sort: Arrange By and Sort By.

Arrange By is more useful in icon view and list view. Setting Arrange by to something else, such as Kind or Last Opened, will have Finder ‘arrange’ the file listing into categories which are ‘sorted’.

If you go to the View menu you’ll see Arrange By. If you then hold down Option (⌥) you’ll get Sort By. Here’s where I got caught out. If you have the submenu open when you start holding Option, you’ll need to have the menu close and reopen before you get the right options.

When working correctly, in column view it seems that the Sort By menu will be disabled unless you have Arrange By set to None.

There’s also a “Arrange” button in the toolbar now, which will display the Sort By menu when you option-click it.

So, if your sorting isn’t working the way you want it, here’s how to reset it:

• View > Arrange By > None (^⌘0)
• Hold Option, View > Sort By > Name (^⌥⌘1)

I hope this helps you in your file management endeavours. I Lion!

Hat Tip: Barney-15E on this thread at Apple Support Communities.

What does it mean?

Honesty time. I suck at staying focused. In my life I’m never far away from an internet-capable device, so distraction is a big time sink for me. Twitter, IM, RSS feeds, iPhone games, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, so much will drain away my time.

When I am on task, it’s usually because I’ve set myself crystal-clear goals for the next few hours. If I can see the desired result and I know exactly how I can get to it, that’d be a good clear goal.

I try to rock the Getting Things Done methodology, using Cultured Code’s Things, with good results: I know exactly what it is I should be working towards. Where I currently let myself down is not doing my regular/weekly reviews, and sometimes slacking on writing good next actions.

Maybe I should mix in the Pomodoro technique to build focus. Anyone out there tried this, or something similar?

Well if it was snowing, I sure wouldn’t be inside; Snow in Wellington? EPIC. I’d be out there enjoying it!

If it snowed so hard I couldn’t leave the house? Alright.

1. Video Games
I’d be all up playing any combination of Minecraft, DoomRL, Weird Worlds, Team Fortress 2, or Spelunky, or whatever! If my girl was with me, I’d probably Wii Bowl for a while.

2. Catch up on my bible reading
I’ll be honest, I’m currently more than a few days behind on Arise’s One Year Bible plan (M’Cheyne’s Classic). I probably should be reading up now as is.

Bible reading is pretty interesting when you have it in context, so I like to use a commentary like the ESV Study Bible. The Bible’s books, especially the New Testament was originally written by their authors with specific audiences in mind, which usually aren’t explictly me. For example, Paul’s letters were to fledgling churches around the Mediterranean: I think context helps a lot for understanding what’s actually going on and why the figures in the Bible wrote what they did. The ESV Study Bible has lots of great insight in its commentary.

3. Internet
I’d be online consuming past issues of every video on The Escapist, especially the Loading Ready Run stuff, catching up on my RSS feeds (though I do have that almost down to a science).

4. Read or listen to a book or podcast
I love to read, or listen to, science fiction. It gives me a chance to see inside other (fictitious) people’s lives and how they would react to crazy circumstances. Science fiction isn’t so much about the explaination about how futuristic technology might work, but rather how we as human beings might react to it, and how we as a race might change because of it.

What would you do on a snow-day?

Part of the internship at Arise will be doing a Local Church Certificate qualification. It’s not much, or probably even all that difficult at NZQA Level 4, but means I’m a student again. Probably a financially-challenged student. The rest of the time I’ll be helping out where my skills and time lead me. Most likely helping with the website and creative side of things, and with anything else that I can help out with.

Slicing my work-time in half when I’m (almost) 30 isn’t something I intend to take lightly. I probably wouldn’t have applied for the internship if my buddy Dan didn’t offer me part-time work at Instinct working on ActionScript and PHP projects.

I’m pretty excited though. I’m gonna be put through this tough time to come out at the other end a different person. Beyond what I’ve said above, I’ve got very little more idea of what will go on. But I say to all of it:

I’m assuming this is omitting face-to-face, which is always best, but as the next substitute:

Instant Messaging, for sure
I’m not great on the phone. If you call me and I don’t have your number, and I say “hello” and you say “it’s me”, I might not be able to place your voice, and that’ll throw me off for the whole phone call. Ask my girlfriend the first time she called me!

I guess text messages fit into this the same way, but they cost cold, hard, cash money. I have been chatting since dial-up BBS days, and we had live see-everything-you’re-typing-as-you-type-it chat back then. We used to press enter twice to say you were done and it was the other person’s turn.

I also learned bad habits with ICQ: I might send you a few short text messages in quick succession rather than save it into one message. This means my message might have cost me double or triple just because with IM if you were typing big long messages,

> you might type sentence fragments
> so the other person knew you were still there
> and hadn’t been disconnected
> by your younger brother
> picking up the phone in the other room

because back then, IM programs didn’t tell you the other user was actually typing something. You might do something like this even:

> LOL
> yeah I saw that last year
> it’s oldie but a goodie

And that’d be more sensible as one SMS.

Japan
As a geek, it’s no surprise that I’d be interested in the Japanese culture. I’m not a huge anime or manga fanboy, though I have dabbled. I’d definitely want to visit the Studio Ghibli Museum.
I’d really want to board with a Japanese family for a few weeks, though I’d have to learn much more Japanese.

Easter Island
This is that place with the big “moai” or tiki heads. They say the people who lived on Easter Island killed all the trees to move and erect those heads. And that you can mountain bike around the island in less than a day.

Canada
Yeah, not that exciting but there’s some pretty awesome people who live in Canada. LoadingReadyRun. Brian Lee O’Malley. Shatner.

Iâ€ve decided I want to blog more.

Rather than just thinking about doing it, Iâ€m starting right now. I will be posting on this blog once a week for all of 2011. I know it wonâ€t be easy, but it might be fun, inspiring, awesome and wonderful. Therefore Iâ€m promising to make use of The DailyPost, and the community of other bloggers with similiar goals, to help me along the way, including asking for help when I need it and encouraging others when I can. If you already read my blog, I hope youâ€ll encourage me with comments and likes, and good will along the way.

Signed, Brett Taylor

Anyway, since the album was released in 2007 I’ve listened to the track over 200 times, building this music video story in my head for Fast Turtle, a superhero turtle of the same name.

So after attending Webstock 2010 and getting inspired and hearing some other crazy cool ideas and being encouraged when I shared this one with Chris Winchester, here’s my treatment for my music video for Anamanaguchi’s Fast Turtle. Give it a read and let me know what you think…

I think it’s pretty tight, I just want constructive criticism and advice for the next step, which I have a feeling is storyboarding and funding. I also need some concept art: I have a little already, and have lots of ideas for environment, characters and even specific shots.

Read the treatment and leave helpful comments below!

lolwtf?

Sure, I did spend some time ‘upskilling’ at work doing the design and html template, but I got the whole WordPress skin done in about 4 hours.

I based it off of the Classic theme (y’know, the ugly default theme) and tweaked the living daylights out of it, adding extra template files.

I’m quite happy with how it came out. What say you?

Want more details on this? Check out Brett’s Arduino Reaction Game in the projects section.

EDGE – NZ$6.49

EDGE is an platformer where you are a cube trying to navigate an isometric landscape in search of the tiny glowing cubes. Some levels are really easy, some require timing, some have cubes hidden away in secret areas. Here though, the music shines, so much that Mobigame released the soundtrack for free! KAKKOI!

Canabalt – NZ$4.19

Canabalt is a free flash game gone iPhone: a one-button ‘daring escape’ platformer. No story up front, but the game has one to tell! Addictive, try the free web version first.

Hook Champ – NZ$4.19

You’re a Jake T. Hooker, an Indiana Jones style tomb-raider stealing idols from dangerous caves and escaping with your amazing grappling hook styles! Easy to learn, hard to master, harder to put down! Try the lite version first, and then buy the full version with more maps and achievements!

Zen Bound – NZ$4.19

A strange game in which you are to bind up a wooden figurine with string. This is meditative gaming at its best: no time limit, but you do eventually run out of string. Again, amazing soundtrack here, with a free download when you buy the game! Get the lite version first to try it out.

Eliss – NZ$4.19

Eliss is a multi-touch puzzler. Gather same coloured circles together, enough so they fit into the ‘squeezars’ to score points. Don’t let different colours touch or it’ll soon be game over. You’ll need all your fingers to play this one, maybe both hands at some points. Lite version also available.

Flight Control – NZ$1.29

A simplified air-traffic control game: draw flight paths for aircraft so they can land on the appropriate runway or landing pad, but don’t let them collide! Harder than it sounds, but quite addicting!

More to come!

I’ve been volunteering at Catalyst IT working with Brenda Wallace to work on projects of her choice. She assigned me to work on Laconica (an open-source version of Twitter that works in a distributed fashion). In order to do so I’ve had to learn a little about many different technologies, like PostgreSQL, the weirdness of Apache+PHP on MacOS X 10.5, and overall, how to checkout and contribute code to an open source software project with Git.

I’ve now had three code merges into Laconica, albeit very minor ones, mostly fixing bugs.

I don’t even use Laconica. (Twitter is working just fine for me, thanks.)

But I feel great.

Computer programming is something some have described as the most complex thing humans have invented — it’s all abstract, there are few corollaries to it in nature. Probably the only thing more complicated is quantum mechanics (but that is, in fact, nature).

My job is to explain, demonstrate, and encourage people who have never programmed a computer in their life (let alone their VCR) to create rather complicated things we call websites.

Why have I enjoyed contributing patches so much to an project I don’t use or much care about? A couple of reasons:

The Zone

The elusive Zone has many names; Wikipedia refers to it as “flow“. It’s that state of being you get when they’re so intensely focussed in the task at hand that time and reality become irrelevant because you’re so energised and focussed and involved at what you’re working on, and having good success at doing it. You come away feeling elated and energised that you’ve completed something of value.

I haven’t been in The Zone for nearly four years. I’ve been teaching people how to program for nearly four years now, and nary the mind to knuckle down and flex my coding muscles. I’m too worked up with office politics, helping my workmates with the technology, and thinking that I wasn’t good enough to be in the industry.

Learning

It’s good to know that I can do it, though to do it professionally, I’d just need to learn more about the processes involved.

I’ve had to learn how to use Git, how to create PostgreSQL users and databases, and submit my finished code to the project administrators for merging with the mainline version of the program’s code.

I don’t normally get to be a learner. I’m a full-time teacher, and what I have to learn is usually because I need to teach it.

It’s nice to learn things for me and me alone. I may never get to teach what I’m learning here, but what I’ve learned is helping fulfill me (more on that later)

That old adage “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. It’s lies.

Actually I’m a tutor, but that’s just a particular kind of teacher. Not meaning to blow my own horn, but according to my student evaluations I am actually a really good tutor. Sure, I have my weaknesses, but overall, apparently I rock at it.

And I really enjoy teaching. It’s rewarding when the metaphorical light-bulbs turn on above the student’s heads. Some of them slowly brighten, some just pop on, and some of them shine more powerfully than others, but the lights do turn on. To know that a learner now understands one of the most complicated things there is to know,

I was at Wordcamp New Zealand here in Wellington over the weekend, and Nicki Gemmell was talking about using blogs at primary schools around New Zealand. She related how uploading an image to a blog was something a principal got excited about: “I uploaded a photo to our school blog today; how cool is that?!”.

As a programmer who has written photo upload functionality, I forget how far I have come and how valuable the skills I have really are. The challenge of teaching people to do things is fun and rewarding. Teaching students to do this even more complicated stuff is the same but even more challenging.

Teaching programming, from my own experience, is the ability to communicate the concepts and foster the understanding and use of them. I was told by a trainer there were four levels of competency:

1. Unconscious Incompetence – you are unaware that you don’t know how to do X.
… awareness brings:
2. Conscious Incompetence – you are aware that you don’t know how to X.
… learning brings:
3. Conscious Competence – you can do X, and you are thinking about it when doing it.
… practice brings:
4. Unconscious Competence – you can do X, but you do not have to think about it when doing it.

I say that there’s a fifth level: where you have become once again conscious of what it is you are competent at. And that’s the level where you’re ready to teach it.

To be able to teach, you must be able to learn, and then go further so you can show others the way.

Those who can teach, do teach.

People

Okay, I’ll be honest: being around Brenda and the other like-minded geeks at Catalyst IT has been a really energising experience. Being able to vent frustration at code and technology, bounce ideas off each other and have fun while doing it has been great.

But working on Laconica and spending some time reading other peoples code and improving it, and learning the technical, and social aspects of doing so has been fun and very enlightening.

My motivation for staying a teacher has been pretty simple: Hell is other people’s work. Most of the employment in the industry has been creating websites for companies; wish fulfilment for others. I could change the world one organisational website at a time, or I could change the world 20 web students at a time.

But working on an open source project has let me use my programming skills to directly improve, ever-so-slightly at this stage, the lives of people around the globe. By making the software they use better.

Having that sense of purpose in what I are doing is really important to me. I don’t want to just be working to collect a pay check: working to live. And I don’t want to be living to work either. I just want to do what is worthwhile while I’m alive: live life to the fullest. Use the abilities I have to do things worth doing.

I am a teacher. I am a programmer. I’ve been neglecting the programmer side of me.

“Computer programming is tremendous fun. Like music, it is a skill that derives from an unknown blend of innate talent and constant practice. Like drawing, it can be shaped to a variety of ends – commercial, artistic, and pure entertainment. Programmers have a well-deserved reputation for working long hours but are rarely credited with being driven by creative fevers. Programmers talk about software development on weekends, vacations, and over meals not because they lack imagination, but because their imagination reveals worlds that others cannot see. Larry O’Brien and Bruce Eckel