Reads #
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The Making of a Corporate Athlete: Treating yourself well, taking care of your health, your mental health, and your sleep makes you perform better, be more empathetic as a leader, and be happier. Lots of practical advice we all know, but may not have put together completely. I hope you’re all taking some time off (US friends).
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Code.org AP CSA curriculum is a hit with teachers and students: Code.org launched a new AP Computer Science A course to focus a little more on creativity and real world problems that should better appeal to more students. Looks fun. Course is here.
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Sony Announces Horizon Series for Netflix, God of War Series for Amazon, and a Gran Turismo Show: (That’s a long headline…). Sony, the only major studio without a streaming service, following up on the success of the Halo series on Paramount+ and partnering across several services. If you’re building games (and I am in my day job), your lore is now potential material for a series. Pretty cool to see these things converging on the story side just as we’re seeing animation slowly converging on the tech side (e.g. using Unreal for TV or film content).
Code & Tools #
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WhatsApp Business Platform: If you do anything in the rest of the world outside the US, WhatsApp is ubiquitous and essential. Facebook finally rolled out their development platform. This will likely be very important.
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Pastel Sense: Since Apple made everyone in tech learn a bit about perceptual image hashing, I’m pretty sure a million people had this idea - using those techniques to identify image ownership/rights on chain and off. This looks like an interesting implementation, though I haven’t used it myself. There are several others out there.
Maker & Home Automation #
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Low Battery Warning Sensor in Home Assistant: If you don’t want wires everywhere, you end up with a lot of battery-powered sensors in your smart home. I really want consistent warnings when batteries are dying so I don’t find out when some automation just stops working. The reddit thread has some good ideas, too.
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Switchbot Curtain: If you’ve given this a try, please let me know. I’d love to use something like this, but am wary of battery-powered things that aren’t part of the curtain system.