General life and learning update

After an absolutely amazing 12 weeks off to celebrate the birth of my second child, my bosses (and bank account) have pulled me back into work.

For those wondering, I'm in the UK and I took a combination of leave as follows:

• 2 weeks paternity leave - standard benefit for most new parents in the UK 
• 5 weeks shared parental leave at statutory pay levels (which is nowhere near a living wage)
• 5 weeks combination of annual leave and bank holidays

God bless the unions who fought for these rights!  so if you haven't already...

This post wasn't intended as a workers/ civil rights protest, but some of the basic rights we have (such as a 5 day working week) have been fought and won by unionised workers.  Employers are (rightly so) afraid of a united workers voice.

Back to business

Now that's off my chest... being back at work means being back in front of a computer with the educational power of the internet at my finger tips.  And keen to progress my programming skills I have been planning some projects dreamt up during the midnight feeds.  So here are the ideas:

- Whisky app: log whisky in my collection and allow for user (me) submitted reviews and star rating.  Include barcode scanner that looks up EAN and completes basic product info.  Link to hosted data service.

- Birthday reminder and best wishes posting bot: (Basically i'm shit at remembering stuff like this and come across as a bad friend etc. when I don't remember this kind of stuff.  Plus also with tow kids knocking about the house now, it might be useful to keep a track of all their friends birthdays as reminder for kids parties etc.

- License plate game: The popular road trip game where you try and spot the different states on passing cars plates.  I'm thinking this might be a useful app for the older child to play on the particularly longer road trips.

- Travel planner, and blogging organiser: Something I've always been interested in was blogging, and in particular about all the cool places I go to (cycling in soweto, kayaking in venice etc.) but by the time I get signal/ data I've forgotten the details etc.  This ide would kind of act like a quick notepad to jot down notes and link to photos taken.  Also as a bit of a geocacher, it would help remind me which caches I've found when I'm logging them later in the GC app...

I know a lot of these have probably already been done, or exist in other formats somewhere, but that's not really the point.  It would be easy just to use other people's work for this, but I want the challenge and satisfaction of creating something from the ground up that I can share with friends and family.

Although my programming skill is limited at the moment, I find that I don't learn that well by swotting up on theory.  I find it is much better for me to learn by doing and that's exactly what I intend to do with the above!

I also promise (to myself) that I'll post more regular updates about my progress to building the above applications.

Every day is a learning day

I've just hit an 150 day streak milestone on Duolingo, just thought I'd share that...  so whilst not programming, I have still been learning languages.