hacker-school-thursday-june-3rd-2014

The last hour of the week is for presentations. It's lightweight. You present what you've been learning or making for up to 10 minutes. It's not mandatory (but may have once been), but it is recommended. I recommend it, because there is nothing like explaining what you are doing to get it clear in your mind, and to renew your excitement. Also, speaking is a skill.

Anyway, the presentations are always really enjoyable for me. First, sometimes people present ideas I didn't understand well, which is educational and grounding. Computer science is such a huge space. It is common to be an expert in one area, with little to no understanding of another. Second there are things that people are doing that I had no idea about, or no idea that they were doing it. It's exhilarating to be surrounded by so much creativity and enthusiasm.

This week's presentations were announced on Twitter with links in subsequent tweets to projects or slides. My slides are up, but they don't reflect the demo partway through. I'd like to put that demo material into the README, which is also out of date.

Something I experienced when registering this project as a package on Pypi, amounts to a self-esteem issue. Making something an official Python package feels like it should be reserved for "serious", valuable projects, and that triggers the "Who do you think you are?" record [1] for me. But I did it anyway.

If I'm making this into a "real" tool that someone else might use, then there are some standards I need to learn how to uphold. Zooko helped me out by tracking issues for me on GitHub, including that I have no --version or --help output. I am eager to fix that. It feels great to follow a tradition, and make something that conforms to expected behaviour. Even if I don't get a lot of users, it is good practice for next time.

Plan

  • Finish yesterday's blog post (I got behind).

Protagonist

  • Prepare to present what I have so far.
  • Implement repair.
  • If I get that far, contemplate designing restore, to recreate the underlying filesystem, if all you had was the protagonist structure.

Actual

  • I finished the blog post, and spent the remainder of the day preparing my presentation.
[1]

If you have not watched Brené Brown's TED videos, I highly recommend them. There are three, each about 20 minutes long: