I survived a year at Shadowcat!

As you may know, I did a placement year/”year in industry” as part of my University degree. This is basically done in one’s third year of studies, before their final year and it helps get experience in the ‘real’ world before graduating. I had the ability to do a placement continue reading…

Form sins: part two

This is a continuation of my previous rant on mistakes web developers make that make forms unusable. Here are other things I’ve noticed, mostly about forms that need your address: Requiring a ‘middle name’. They’re not used in every country in the world. Having a broken country input. This, in continue reading…

Web forms

Web forms. They are used everywhere. Yet I have seen so many things done in them, that have made it difficult for even myself (a tech-savvy user, a web developer) to fill in. This should not happen. Filling in web forms is required for many reasons, yet to many users continue reading…

A quick review of Scratch

My life as a CodeClub volunteer consists mainly of complaining about wonderful public transport options and working with a program called Scratch. In this post, I will talk about the latter, as it is probably more interesting 😉 Scratch is an interactive, drag-and-drop programming language that allows users to make continue reading…

Codeclub: Teaching code in Cumbria

One of the many things I am is a STEM Ambassador. I have talked about this in a previous blog post, but STEM Ambassadors are volunteers that support sessions and run clubs and other activities in schools. I've been wanting to run a CodeClub for a while. Codeclub a volunteer-led continue reading…

Supporting an openhatch session

About a week ago, I heard that the socialcoding4good community manager Emma Irwin was running an OpenHatch session at the University of Victoria (in Canada!) OpenHatch sessions are meant to help students get started in contributing to Open Source software. Emma was also going to show them how to contribute continue reading…