things i looked at, did, thought, etc vol 10
loving Newsblur so far. nice to have everything out of my inbox.
and to be able to dip into feeds without seeing any work - the line between "stuff I need to read for my job" and "stuff I have a personal interest in" is pretty fuzzy so I can happily pick up blogs and newsletters in the evening without THINGS THAT NEED DOING getting in the way.Euston’s future in limbo: HS2 speculation, overcrowding, and delayed decisions (ianvisits.co.uk)
always love a visit to Scarfolk Council
Reconciliation: A game designed to frustrate the player (bitsaboutmoney.com) a gem from the ye olde saves
Beautiful Soup Documentation — Beautiful Soup 4.12.0 documentation (crummy.com) - always like magic watching a soup script run
one of the many rambles I was going to post was about getting in the mindset of thinking about data as all the information needed for something. another one of those things that sounds so obvious its stupid. but its easy to get stuck in the mindset of data = databases and CSVs and that’s all there is to it. there's reams of stuff OUTSIDE the computer systems that we could be thinking about capturing and processing and organising.
hence the scraping, in a couple of minutes I've taken text off of 30 odd webpages, organised it into a CSV and got it linked up to some internal data. previously this would either be done with a heath robinson arrangement of pasted text and VLOOKUPS in excel, or by people manually looking stuff up.
don’t even get me started on all the stuff we have in PDFs and images! 🤯Microsoft PowerToys | Microsoft Learn I keep forgetting this exists so I've pinned it to my taskbar!
dealing with the afore mentioned heath robinson-esque spreadsheets is part frustrating but also im in awe of the ingenuity of the stuff people can come up with using limited tools.
as in people outside ICT that don’t have the luxury of direct database access, being able to run SQL and Python scripts and stuff like that.
i hope data thing will let us safely open up more access and more tools to people outside ICT so they can work on more cool stuff.weighing up whether to just book a date (a very soon date!) to present something I've done hardly any prep on rather than finish the work and then find a date for the meeting... 😈 I want the thing DONE. and it ain't gonna be done while its sitting in my onenote being tinkered with...