Kind: Likes

a way to pay compliments to the original post/poster of external content

Encouraging learning

Am I Doing Homeschooling Right? January 8, 2015 In Hacking School (John Saddington)

I want my daughter to experience life in a much larger and broader sense. And, I want to invite her to see how her father works and the people that he meets and the things that he gets to do in an environment that is creative and open.

John's post struck a chord with me. No, I'm not homeschooling my kids. But the photos of Roenne sitting at the MacBook with her over-sized headphones suddenly had me thinking about my daughter, Kiran.

She has suddenly discovered she likes programming. This from a child who told me on many occasions when I tried to get her and her brother interested in my Raspberry Pi that she had no interest at all in programming.

Now, she's gushing about what's she's doing with HTML and JavaScript. I don't know why she's changed her mind, but I see her sitting at the iMac tapping and clicking away on code.org's web site.

Last night we had a conversation about Ruby, Python and Java and how these languages get their names. Her teacher says she talks about my Raspberry Pi and me all the time. I'm just glad she's interested, and I want to encourage her. Hopefully, I won't screw this up. For now, I will continue to engage her in conversations to find out what she likes about coding.

The struggle to overcome what appears as ineffectiveness

The struggle to overcome what appears as ineffectiveness by Riccardo Mori (Morrick)

Feedback is little. People don’t seem to care (much). My attempts at attracting people’s attention towards this place, my projects and my fiction don’t seem to have long-lasting effects[1]. There’s the occasional spark. The occasional link. The fleeting endorsement. But readers don’t seem to stick, to return.

I'm not a writer -- at least not in the professional sense -- but those words resonated with me. I've been writing on this blog for over 10 years. Sometimes the quality of my wiring is good and I get a rush of traffic. But it doesn't last. Perhaps what I write isn't interesting or good enough. But ... I'm not giving this up. Please click through and read Riccardo's other post. He's also on ADN.