As a throw back to last week’s post, it looks like Reading Rainbow is up to ~$3.5mil of their new $5mil goal. How incredible is that? I think this is so wonderful and exciting. It’s great to see “Reading Rainbow 2.0” in the works to help bolster a love of reading in today’s kids. I think this is especially important because it seems like today is so noisy. Constant status updates on social media with small character limitations practically trains young minds to stop after the first paragraph.
But the first paragraph is only an introduction! All the good stuff doesn’t happen until you read all the subsequent paragraphs! /newparagraphonpurpose
On this week’s social radar I came across this lovely campaign:
http://www.foodrecoverynetwork.org/
The goal is to help coordinate donations of unused/leftover food. It looks like it’s not wholly unique: there is an app for a similar effort dedicated to San Francisco (disclaimer: I’m not in San Francisco):
http://feeding-forward-node.herokuapp.com/
I love this idea. I think it’s awful that so much food is wasted because it’s too close to the expiration, or it can’t be put out the next day (e.g. prepared food at college campuses or grocery stores that is never bought). I’m not sure if we have anything like this locally, but I think it would be a great thing to start if we don’t. I’ll look into it :D
In other news this week I started the first two classes of the R Signature Track by JHU on Coursera:
https://www.coursera.org/specialization/jhudatascience/1?utm_medium=courseDescripTop
So far, so good. It’s nice to ease into (especially since the first course is pretty dedicated to terminology and learning to use some well-known developer tools like git. The video lectures are very well done – clear, easy to understand, and captioned! So far the assignments have been on par with the course material – everything ties together nicely.
This is one of those things where I’m really excited to be learning something new, but I’m not sure how it will apply to anything I’m working on (yet!). Of course, all that means is that I need to figure out a project to work on it with. I could always put some exercises up here once I get far enough along to do so.
Which brings me to one of my main hopes for this blog: once I get into my “flow”, I really want to make this blog into an online tutorial of sorts. Basically: as I learn and grow as a programmer, I want to share the wealth. It will probably be a while before I start posting any exercises so I can get far enough into the course for the exercises to be useful, but hopefully they will make good references for others. Here’s to hoping!
The Coding Mant.is 