Koding and Raspberry Pi

My apologies for the delay between posts. Unfortunately, I am in the process of transitioning between jobs and job-searching is mostly all that I’ve been doing. It’s a draining, depressing and unfortunately necessary part of progressing through your career. Fortunately, I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I see Firebootcamp as being my foot in the door and my means of progressing toward an answer to what I would like to do most. Would you look at that, less than a hundred words and already on a tangent. Now, on to the point of this post…

I recently stumbled upon Koding, a site where you can collaborate with others on projects or learn to program in one of several languages all while being able to deploy your apps to a VM where you get root access and storage space you can pool with others for larger projects. It’s a very interesting project and one I hope to use to become more familiar with working with others on a single project. I know my knowledge is still very limited to within the language/framework. I have a much more shallow understanding of creating an application using Bootstrap, say, or a full web application without the help of Microsoft’s numerous abstractions that I used when learning C#.

The other part of this post is about the Raspberry Pi I will be purchasing in the next week. The Raspberry Pi, for those who are unaware, is a small single-board computer that can be had for about $35 AUD. The internet is full of people using their little devices to host webservers, monitor their homes, fly drones or even control robots. The low cost and expandability have hit a sweet spot for a lot of people and has spawned some interesting creations, many of which went to Kickstarter to acquire funding. I plan on starting more humbly, however.

The Raspbery Pi isn’t a very powerful machine and I am thankful for this. I plan on building something, possibly a blog or site of some kind, and then figuring out how to make it run well on the Pi. After that, adding functionality and keeping performance up will be a challenge that will be a valuable learning experience in performance monitoring. I’ve even recruited a friend to build the site with me, possibly while trying out Koding, so we can both improve our skills.

I’m very excited for my Raspberry Pi and what I’ll gain from tinkering with it. I’m reminded of a testimony I saw of Neil deGrasse Tyson where he quotes a French aviator:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood, don’t assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea”

I won’t say my tinkering is out of a longing for something so grand but it’s the same curiosity that drives me. I’m looking forward to exploring.