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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • All the other comments are great advice. As an ex chemist who does quite a bit of code I’ll add:

    Do you want code that works, or code that works?! It’s reasonably easy to knock out ugly code that only works once, and that can be just what you need. It takes a little more effort however to make it robust. Think about how it can fail and trap the failures. If you’re sharing code with others, this is even more important a people do ‘interesting’ things.

    There’s a lot of temporary code that’s had a very long life in production, this has technical debt… Is it documented? Is it stable? Is it secure? Ideally it should be

    Code examples on the first page of Google tend to work ok, but are not generally secure, e.g doing SQL queries instead of using prepared statements. Doesn’t take much extra effort to do it properly and gives you peace of mind. We create sboms for our code now so we can easily check if a component has gained a vulnerability. Doesn’t mean our code is good, but it helps. You don’t really want to be the person who’s code helped let an attacker in.

    Any code you write, especially stuff you share will give you a support and maintenance task long term. Pirate for it!

    Code sometimes just stops working. - at least I’m my experience. Sacrifice something to the gods and all will be fine.

    Finally, you probably know more than you think. You’ve plenty of experience. Most of the time I can do what I need without e.g. classes, but sometimes I’ll intentionally use a technique in a project just to learn it. I can’t learn stuff if I don’t have a use for it.

    I’m still learning, so if I’ve got any part of the above wrong, please help me out.




  • There’s a lot of Scotland, and don’t underestimate driving times. Argyll is good, but can be rather wet any time of the year. Going around now you should be safe from the midgies. Recommend getting onto some of the islands too, and boat rides are always nice. Kerrera is a lovely little island just by Oban. It has a very atmospheric castle, though the teashop isn’t as good as it was so pack a lunch. If you like a dram, make a tour of some distilleries, each has it’s own character. Argyll has lots of archeology & standing stones if that’s your thing. There are loads of lumpy bits of you like walking too. Pretty much anywhere is good, tourist hotspot are ok, but try to get off the beaten track once in a while.

    If you’re driving, and going onto country roads, please please please learn to reverse.

    If you’re lucky you may get to spot some wild haggis, but they’re quite rare now. The farmed ones are cute but have a nasty bite so be careful.

    Also don’t neglect the borders, loads of history.

    It may not sound your thing, but consider geocaching… It takes you to some interesting out of the way places.





  • Arduino and esp32 are both good places to start. On YouTube look up ralph s bacon I think he is - He does lots of microcontroller stuff, and of course the likes of big clive will teach you all about basic electronic circuits.

    If you’re a complete newbie, get a kit and work through the tutorials.

    Stuff you’ll need at first is a microcontroller, prototyping breadboard and a few components (should all come in the kit of you go that route). When you have something that works that you want to keep, you can think about a cheap (ish) soldering station and either veroboard, or look into getting your own boards made.

    A multimeter will help a lot (cheapish will do) and depending on how deep you get, a bench power supply and an oscilloscope, but you can live without those for a while.

    Get good quality solder, and using extra food quality flux changed the game for me. If you are an older person, magnification really helps too!

    Get components in 10’s or more as you’ll save a little and it doesn’t matter much if you let out the magic smoke. For hobby stuff, Alix is your friend.

    Have fun.


  • The PI is always a good place to start, but they’re not cheap anymore. You can still do some useful things at the command line (not sure how fun, but a great education), python is there and very accessible. - get a camera and you could do some great things with open CV. Not sure what packages are out there though. Think you’d just have to follow some web tutorials.

    As an alternative, have you considered an Arduino kit? Lots of great projects, all very well documented. Playing with LEDs, sensors, motors etc may keep their attention longer than a bash prompt.