In last week, I was teaching Python. The class becomes much more interesting after teaching the web scraping. My students are fetching weather data, news headings, stock charts and more. For new learning programmers, they often struggle to get a computer installing the Python runtime. They don’t have desktop at home and they can’t install things at work. But they all have an iPad. By using Pythonista, we can use many of the Python scripts in iOS.
The shortcuts app and Pythonista app allows us to create many different kinds of automation in mobile devices that fit our own needs.
Building this kind of automation requires the sense of programming. By making the programming as simple as putting different blocks together that runs on iOS, we are really lowering the burden of programming skills. This encourages every one to automate their daily workflow. At least they can download and tweak the shortcut workflows if not creating a new one from scratch.
“An internet where every publisher is using the same 30 components controlled by one company? No thanks.”
Exactly my response to AMP. No thanks.
Coder Server → An open source project that runs VS Code on server
I have almost a hundred of workspaces on Cloud9 and they are migrating into AWS that shut downs the original Cloud9 service. I took some time last week to setup an AWS Cloud9 with Blink and Textastic on iPad for my development on the go.
From Pomodoro to uninterrupted time block → Flow time
Whatever the name it is, I have been using a variant of Pomodoro techniques which cancelled the maximum 25 minutes limitation. Instead, I set the 20-25 minutes as minimum time slot. If I can work on something for 25 minutes, I will be into the flow at that moment and the true work begins to happens. So forcing me to break at 25 minutes don’t work because that’s the golden time.
Similar as Pomodoro, I still mark how much time I used. This is useful for reviewing how much difference between actual time needed for a task and the self-estimation.
The key take away of the share was to stay focus. By having large block of time focusing on one thing, our mind can really concentrate on that one thing and different possibilities may appear to solve the particular task that we are working on.
This leads to our quote worth sharing this week: “Do less, then obsess”.
