Geek Wisdom

  The week just before Christmas, I had the opportunity to complete my last speech for the dynamic leadership level 1 of Toastmasters . The speech was a mix of a collection of research both on Eco-Cycle Planning, and practice opportunity from the U.N.I.C.O.R.N.S.  Some important resources to go with the video can be found here: a) The original start of unicorns which can be found on this apolitical.co post: Let's save the unicorns in government b) EcoCycle Planning from the book Liberating Structures , as well as the related image/worksheet as used in the video c) Much thanks to the excellent 4 part series Bountiful Harvest by TadZo Consulting, without which I would not have nearly as much content for the video.                 Part 1 - Creative Destruction                Part 2 - Sowing                Part 3 - Birth    ...

It's never too late to learn something new This is something I tend to forget once in a while.  Today I was reminded of this fact by an email from a key Dogecoin contributor Ross Nichol .  A while back I wrote an article on #askageek on how you can send secure/secret message to your friends and family members using 'GPG' . These steps include how you can then submit a copy of your public key to a key server so that other people can verify and decrypt your messages. Well today I learned, that you can also put a copy of your public key on GitHub , and use it as another method of verifying users. What is interesting about this, is that I have had my GPG key in GitHub for a while as a method of digitally signing my code. You can find a great step by step tutorial (with video) on how to do this over at dev.to What I did not realize, however, is that you can also view the public keys of GitHub users simply by adding the text ".gpg" to the user profile name: For example...

It's not always easy to be a programmer! - Ask any coder what one of the most annoying things is to do and it is "debugging".  Trying to figure out why the nice, beautiful code you just wrote, does not do exactly what you expected it to do! One of the main difficulties in writing software is the inability to imagine all of the possibilities a user might intend to use it for, which often is far greater then what the programmer had intended. To do this we need to use our imagination to think questions like "what happens if a user types "X"?' or what should happen when the user enters letters in a number only field?. What if the user hits both the return key and the escape key at the same time? Often even the user doesn't even know why they 'did' it the way they did it..from their point of view that just seemed the 'obvious' thing to do ! In programming tech-talk we call this "Defensive Programming"  and while the reality is w...