My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.
In celebration of Hacktoberfest, which has a pretty great 80s theme, I composed a 5 song EP of synthwave tunes. I limited myself to virtual recreations of classic synths like the Roland 707 drum machine, the Yamaha DX-7 synth, and the Roland Jupiter-8. Give it a listen!
(Originally posted over at Medium)
In this post, the author, Dominic Pace, argues that we should teach “actual programming” instead of Scratch. I encourage you to read that first because it makes some great points. It’s written by a high school senior who’s hit upon something important: “Learn to code” tools like Scratch and Alice really are somewhat disconnected from software development. They do help with problem-solving, and they do help students work with the very basics of software development, but they create an unrealistic expectation of how we really build software.
Today marks one year with DigitalOcean, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m so unbelievably lucky to get to do what I do there. I work on the DigitalOcean Tutorials collection, where I help community authors get their articles published. It’s the perfect job for me, as I get to draw from my software development and system administration backgrounds, as well as my writing, editing, and teaching experiences. Writing software is fun, but DigitalOcean gives me the opportunity to help others get better at what they do.
I’m nearly two months into my new job. For those of you that haven’t heard, I am a Technical Editor at DigitalOcean, a fantastic startup based in New York City. I work with a great team of people, and I help open-source enthusiasts share their knowledge through written tutorials. I’m responsible for taking their submitted tutorials and testing them out, looking for inaccuracies, security problems, or other issues a reader might encounter.
I’ve had an amazing time teaching aspiring software developers. Over the course of the last four years I’ve had the privilege of teaching over 400 students how to use Linux, how to build their first web sites, and how to write their first software applications. I’ve met some truly incredible people and forged some great relationships which I hope continue on for many years. But today I turned in my letter of resignation and am looking forward to what lies ahead.
Measuring how long a software project will take is a futile endeavor. Unfortunately, people who hire software developers have a habit of asking for the impossible. Like when they want you to build a Facebook clone in two weeks for $200. So to appease my clients and managers over the years, I developed a formula to somewhat accurately address the “how long will it take” question. And despite it being a bit tounge-in-cheek, it’s startlingly accurate when you sit down and think about it.
I’ve been around software development a long time, and a reoccurring theme is to see this kind of feedback from peers:
In August, I embarked on a huge task: I set out to record and release one song a day for an entire month. And I actually did it. The entire playlist is up online.
This is it.. the last #MonthOfMusic song. (To listen to the whole month, check out http://bphogan.com/tag/monthofmusic) For the finale, I chose to finally record a song I wrote a long time ago for my wife, Carissa. Here it is. Hope you enjoy, and thanks for listening.
Just a little piano piece I wrote a long time ago. I figured it was time to record it.