I’m delighted to be part of Clark College for another year. This marks my fourth year at the college teaching web development. Here’s a list of all the courses that I have taught:
In this week’s episode of the Getting Work To Work podcast, Chris Martin talks about whether an artist should be a generalist or a specialist. As a creative generalist with interests in multiple subjects including filmmaking, web design and development, photography, teaching and more, Chris struggles with the advice of picking one pursuit and doing only that.
Going to shit
2015 is when web development went to shit. Web development used to be nice. You could fire up a text editor and start creating JS and CSS files. You can absolutely still do this. That has not changed. So yes, everything I’m about to say can be invalidated by saying that.
Read “The Sad State of Web Development” >
Late on Friday, I received an email from IBM letting me know that I was named an IBM Champion for Cloud. I’m honored to be part of this inaugural group of individuals. A huge thank you to those people who nominated and encouraged me to start using Bluemix.
This seems to be a very popular blog post on this blog. Here it is again for those who want to play around with Python and MongoDB.
The code below demonstrates how to use Python to connect to a MongoDB database. I chose to use a cloud based instance of MongoDB provided free of charge by MongoLab.com. The script demonstrates how to:
I also used a local instance of MongoDB for testing. You will will need to use a Python package manager such as EasyInstall to install the PyMongo library.
Here is the Python code:
If you have any questions please let me know.
Here’s the sound a blind person hears when their screen reader reads your email aloud that only contains a graphical image announcing an event:
“Image, Event announcement”
Pro Tip: Don’t send email messages that have all the content in your super cool Photoshop/MSPaint graphic.
They are what philosopher Harry Frankfurt would call “bullshitters.” Those that are giving advice for the sake of giving advice, without any regard as to how it is actually implemented, if it can even be implemented at all. “It’s not important to [the bullshitter] what the world really is like,” he says in a short video documentary about the phenomenon (below). “What is important is how he’d like to represent himself.”
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This Bullshit Industrial Complex has always existed. But thanks to the precarious economics and job prospects of the creative person, it is often in a creative’s financial interest to climb the bullshit pyramid. In the short term, it’s creating a class of (often young) creatives deluded into thinking they are doing something meaningful by sharing “advice.” Long term, it’s robbing us of a creative talent.
OH: NodeJS + MongoDB is this generation’s Laurel and Hardy stack (“look at this mess you got me into”). Last generation’s was PHP + MySQL
— Stephan H. Wissel (@notessensei) June 9, 2016
Bruce Elgort 