Late Summer and Fireweed
What day is it again? It's time to start wrapping up the summer with an email recap of everything going on as the days count down to the start of school.
When I was growing up in Alaska, there was a flower that was everywhere called fireweed. You’d see huge fields of them off the highway and they had these bright magenta flowers arranged in a cone near the top of the plant. They’d appear in May and start blooming the flowers from the bottom of the cone. You’d know that summer was ending in July and August as the flowers reached the tip of the plant.
While we don’t have fireweed in Florida, it feels like the flowers are getting to the top of the fireweed this week.
Curriculum Design Episode
We published our latest episode with Quinten Sheriff last week and it’s all about planning for the upcoming school year. The advice he gave was highly focused on setting goals, making learner personas, and connecting the two in relevant ways.
Python Post-Production (Say it 5x fast)
As an interesting note about this episode, we did all the audio post-production using Python and some useful audio APIs from Dolby.io and AssemblyAI. There’s even a transcoding step to MP3 using the ffmpeg-python library. You can check out the code on Github.
All good things…
Unfortunately, summer can’t last forever. Kelly and I are heading back to the classroom starting next week. We’re jumping right into technology setup for our division and new teacher training on systems and processes. Our school is launching a new Student Information System this fall, our middle school teachers are all getting new SMART boards, and there’s even an application launcher that handles single-sign-on and rostering for our apps. Keep an ear out on future episodes for our progress and how we can use Python to automate processes and improve data quality.
Machine Learning Courses
Kelly and I are both in the middle of the Udacity/AWS machine learning course and it’s a solid introduction to AI and ML concepts. Kelly’s a bit further ahead than I am, as I really got caught up in trying to migrate the example trash sorting program for AWS DeepLens from Python 2 to Python3 and AWS Greengrass. If I get sample code working, it will go on my GitHub.
Summer Projects Underway
People who think teachers have the summer off may also believe that football players only work on game day. Kelly and I have been working all summer on different projects for personal and professional use. Here’s a sampling of some of the things we’ve done:
FastAPI healthcare provider API (Sean)
Web scraper that pulls US state-level healthcare license data and standardizes it
Includes Celery scheduling for task management
Geocoding of addresses and locations
Barcode Scanner Programs (Sean)
GUI and CLI programs that speed up inventory management of iPads and Chromebooks
As devices are brought into the school, they can be scanned into the program, automatically assigned, and provisioned
Using the ldap3 library, student profile information is added to each entry and validated.
JetBrains Academy Audit (Kelly)
Kelly has been running through all of the JetBrains Academy content for Python and reports that it is well-designed and has great examples. You can even connect it to PyCharm Edu and have your course content right in the IDE.
Summer Projects Undone
It wouldn’t be summer if we didn’t have a bunch of projects that we never got around to finishing. This summer, I was planning to learn JavaScript and React but never made the time. Add it to the list of things to squeeze in during the school year.
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Sending out best wishes to all of you that are wrapping up your summer, whether that means you’re going back to school or not.
Keep coding & keep learning (preferably Python!)
- Sean