The best tool is one that helps you learn! I've enjoyed participating in Advent of Code for the last few years. It's a series of daily Christmas-themed coding challenges throughout December, and it's great fun. https://adventofcode.com/2020 I post my solutions in Jupyter notebooks on...
Ever wanted to know how many visitors you’ve had to your website? Or wanted to know which pages, articles or downloads are the most popular? If you’re self-hosting your blog or website, whether you use Apache, nginx or even IIS (yes, really), lars is here to help. Lars is a web server log toolkit...
structa is a hidden gem. It’s one of many great utilities created by Dave Jones. It’s a command line tool for analysing JSON files. Sometimes you need to inspect the structure of a large nested JSON file, and it’s too unwieldy to work out what kind of data it contains. structa is perfect for...
Last time, I did a video tutorial introducing Anvil, a web-based tool for building web apps. Today I have a new video in which I build a new app in Anvil, and then deploy it to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi, to make use of some Raspberry Pi specific features. This app features a grid of information...
I've had a blog since 2006. I started using Blogger — Google's 2003 acquisition — allowing 17-year-old-me to publish my thoughts and share my adventures with the world in my own corner of web space at blogspot.com. I can still log in to my blogspot account and see the old posts – although it...
Anvil is a web-based tool for building full-stack web apps with nothing but Python. It’s great for building demos, prototypes, web forms, CRUD apps and all sorts of interactive applications. The Anvil app builder is probably the most enjoyable developer experience I’ve ever had. Its autocomplete is...
One of my essential tools for working with code and data files is meld. It’s a graphical diff tool, so if you’ve ever used diff and struggled to make sense of the output, meld is here to help. This is a brilliant description from the project’s website: Meld is a visual diff and merge tool ...
Issue #91 of the official Raspberry Pi magazine, The MagPi, has just been published and it features an interview with me, about my time at the Foundation (and a bit before), letting the community know what I’m moving on to at the BBC. You can buy or download the issue here: Issue #91 Here’s what...
A few months ago I was looking through questions posted to the Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange site. If you’re not familiar, Stack Exchange provides Q&A sites like Stack Overflow for specific areas, such as particular programming languages, technologies or other topics. And while observing the erratic...
Just a quick note to say I'm leaving the Raspberry Pi Foundation to start a new role at the BBC. I've been at Raspberry Pi for over six years, and it's been great. I'm excited to join an innovation team called BBC News Labs. They find new ways to solve problems with technology, making lives easier...
The piwheels project provides pre-compiled Python packages for Raspberry Pi users, saving them considerable time and effort. I wrote about piwheels a little over a year ago - I remember Red Hatter Jeff Mackanic telling me at ATO 2018 how impressed he was with the project. Back then, piwheels was...