Your Guide to Software Development

Linux Learning Options

Written 2016-09-15 by Len Payne in Link Dump

One of the things I get to do is introduce people to the GNU/Linux operating system.

It’s arguably one of the best parts of my job, because it opens a whole new world of software and possibilities.

We teach Linux in the classroom because it’s the single-most-used web server OS on the planet, and it isn’t giving up that spot soon.

My personal history with Linux spans 18 years (I haven’t quite been with it since the beginning.) Today, I use whatever’s right for the job, but I’ve got some insight to share for newcomers to the Linux community.

News Sources I Follow

Written 2016-09-05 by Len Payne in Link Dump

Welcome back to good intentions. This week I’d like to focus on tech news sources so that I can provide a comprehensive list for my new students that are starting at Lambton College in the CPRO, CSAC, IPRC, and ITP programs.

The two most important sources I use are reddit and Hacker News. These are news aggregators and communities unto themselves.

But there’s so much more, so I’ll continue and break it down into a categorized list.

The Canadian Tech Industry

Written 2015-11-21 by Len Payne in Link Dump

This week I’d like to focus on the state of the industry in Canadian Tech. A small group of us from the Cube went to the Canadian Innovation Exchange this past week and it got me to thinking that I’d like to do a little who’s who and what’s what.

Canadian Companies Doing Very Well

Jekyll Capitalize Categories

Written 2015-11-15 by Len Payne in Learning

I just wasted two hours solving a problem caused by throwing away good information.

Jekyll has a site.categories collection that keeps a list of all categories on a site. As it should. For some crazy reason, though, that list throws away case formatting. For example, a category called “My Category” would be stored as “my category” in site.categories.

I iterate over site.categories to build my navigation menu, so I wanted that case-sensitivity back. I found a hack that works. Keep reading to see my solution.

Brainstorming a Plan

Written 2015-11-03 by Len Payne in Learning

I’m going to use this as a bit of a stream-of-consciousness post that will wrap around and collect some of my more useful meanderings into semi-coherent plans.

In short: I’m trying to practice logging/journalling. It’s been a while.

The biggest directions I want to go in are: reading, writing, and video production.

It’s not quite the 3 Rs, but it’s where my head is going these days and I want to follow my brain. Feel free to follow along.