Last December I started my job at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and this time last year, having just completed my first month, I wrote my review of 2013 and all the events which led up to that move.
Here is a round-up of all that’s happened since then.
Talks & Conferences
This year I gave my first full conference talk, my first overseas conference talk, my first keynote, and many more talks throughout the year! I gave over 40 talks and workshops in 2014, up from 32 in 2013.
My favourite conference badge of the year
The highlights:
- I attended the BETT education conference representing Raspberry Pi
- I took my first overseas work trip to Brussels for FOSDEM (Free and Open source Software Developers’ European Meeting)
- I gave a keynote with Carrie Anne Philbin at Raspberry Jamboree 2014
- I ran a Raspberry Pi camera workshop at Cheltenham Science Festival
- I spoke at 5 Python conferences:
- EuroPython in Berlin
- EuroSciPy in Cambridge (keynote)
- PyConUK in Coventry
- PySS in San Sebastian, Spain (keynote)
- PyCon Ireland
- I spoke for the IMA (Institute of Mathematics and its Applications) at MMU in Manchester
- I gave 17 talks in schools, universities and community spaces on my USA tour (more below)
See my full list of talks with links to videos and slides on my talks page.
Speaking at a hackspace in America
I also got to meet creator of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee at the Open Data Institute Summit where I was supporting Amy Mather who was speaking at the event.
Meeting Tim Berners-Lee with Amy and Dan Mather
Interviews
I gave a few interviews for magazines and websites:
- An interview I gave with my colleagues Clive Beale and Carrie Anne was featured in Linux Voice magazine
- I appeared on the front cover of Linux Format magazine, which featured an interview they conducted with me at Oggcamp
- I was also interviewed by Russell Barnes for the raspi.today podcast about my work on the Raspberry Pi Education Team
Linux Voice
Me on the front of Linux Format magazine
USA Tour
I was asked to go on a tour of America to do some outreach work for Raspberry Pi – and I said I’d be travelling from New York to Salt Lake City. I planned a route based around requests for visits and ended up covering 4200 miles in a hire car, giving 17 talks in schools, universities and hackspaces. I had a brilliant experience, met some great people and spread the word about what the Foundation is doing.
The places I visited:
- New York City, New York
- Washington, DC
- Raleigh, North Carolina
- Greensboro, North Carolina
- Charlotte, North Carolina
- Pigeon River, Tennessee
- Lawrenceville, Georgia
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Chattanooga, Tennessee
- Talladega, Alabama
- Somerville, Tennessee
- Louisville, Kentucky
- St. Louis, Missouri
- Colombia, Missouri
- Denver, Colorado
- Boulder, Colorado
- Provo, Utah
- Logan, Utah
- Salt Lake City, Utah
You can read a full account of my trip on the Raspberry Pi blog: Ben’s Mega USA Tour
Raspberry Pi Website
In the first few months of the year I worked hard on building a new website for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, extending the existing blog in to a full website with various sections and numerous components. This was launched in April and received praise from the community. It has evolved somewhat since its initial release and took on some new design tweaks recently with complementary illustrative graphics from Sam Alder.
The website now features:
- Informative homepage
- Blog
- Downloads
- Documentation (source on GitHub)
- Community pages
- Help pages
- Free learning resources (source on GitHub)
- Raspberry Jam events directory
- Products pages
- and more!
raspberrypi.org in early January 2015
Pi Weekly
I’ve continued to run Pi Weekly, putting out a newsletter each week with help from Ryan Walmsley, who recently stepped down to concentrate on his university studies.
Now at its 81st issue, not having missed a single week since launching in June 2013, it’s going strong with a subscription base of over 11,000, up almost double in a year.
Raspberry Pi Learning Resources
I wrote a number of learning resources as part of my role at Raspberry Pi. Some notable ones being:
I’ve been working on other projects such as the upcoming Chef HAT (sous vide cooking with Raspberry Pi and Energenie) with Rachel Rayns, which will lead to a set of new resources and maybe even a bank of open source cooking recipes!
I’ve also been running workshops and giving presentations at Picademy – the free teacher training course we started running this year, introducing teachers to using the Raspberry Pi in the classroom and giving them the confidence to successfully deliver the new computing curriculum.
Open Source Projects
As well as numerous contributions to existing open source projects, I’ve released my first two Python modules which can be found on PyPi and installed with pip:
- energenie – for controlling power sockets remotely with a Raspberry Pi (this included modularising and packaging the work of Amy Mather from her work experience at Pi Towers)
- pyjokes – one line jokes for programmers
I’m currently working on packaging energenie for Debian, and have some other packaging work to do once I’ve got the hang of it.
I’ve also made a name for myself in my advocacy of GitHub – teaching people how to use it or get more from it, and introducing teachers to using it in it education.
And here’s what my year of public GitHub contributions looks like:
2015
I’ll be doing more of the same in my role at Raspberry Pi, hopefully producing some more projects and writing more resources.
I’ve just bought myself a nice new camera so I’ll be learning how to use it and posting photos to Flickr at flickr.com/photos/ben_nuttall