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Episode 4 — Whitni Watkins

Today, I'm chatting with Whitni Watkins, a Web Systems Engineer at Analog Devices.

• Github: whitni
• Twitter: @_whitni
• Site: nimblelibrarian.com

In this episode

We talk about ending up in programming without a CS degree, informal learning and hidden prerequisites, using programming in your life, Code Club, teaching yourself and others to code, and Whitni's unbelievably freaking cool app that uses echolocation to help you evaluate whether your library spaces are acoustically well-suited to their functions.

The echolocation app is like this:

Links

So many nouns turned up in this episode!

• Google Search Appliance — for when you need Google to be all enterprise-y and operate on your business data
• Piwik — an open source alternative to Google web analytics
• LITA Forum, where Whitni presented about her app (for future app development, see the Cosine Lab at Clarkson)
• Signal processing
• Dale Askey’s Code4Lib Journal article on why we don’t open source our code
• My previous employer, Unglue.it, and boss Eric Hellman
• Scratch, MIT’s super awesome programming language for kids
• Tiny little computers and hackable/playful hardware:
  • RPi
  • Arduino
  • Little Bits
• Learn-to-code options:
  • Hour of Code
  • Codecademy
• IFTTT (“If this, then that”) — lets you do the programming task of connecting different apps’ inputs, outputs, and actions together even if you have no programming knowledge
• Code Club!
  • Saron Yitbarek’s presentation that kicked the whole thing off
  • Coral Sheldon-Hess’s Code4Lib 2015 talk that spawned a slew of libraryland code clubs (description and slides, video)
  • Sarah Simpkin’s related presentation at Access (video)