Life Lately

Hey everyone. I can't believe it's already more than half way through July and I've only posted 2 (ok, this counts as 3) blog posts. Life has been quite busy lately. I had an epic birthday a few weeks ago now and feel so incredibly blessed that I was able to share an awesome pre-birthday day with both family and friends together - something that doesn't happen often when you live and work far from where you grew up.

At work, we had a pretty intense testing phase of our project a few weeks back (known as FAT - Factory Acceptance Testing) which ran smoothly. There were a few bugs and a few smaller features that we identified as useful to the client, which is normal for these types of projects. But we didn't find anything hugely wrong while we were testing, which is really great news for us. After 6 months spent putting together specifications and another 6 months developing what we had specified, it would have been worrying if we had found major issues. So, so far so good on that front.

Otherwise, Frosty and I have been busy carrying on with two online courses*. The one is a basic programming course and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning how to program but unsure of where to start. It teaches you how to program using the Python programming language and has great videos and explanations on the basics of programming concepts. Remember the Photo Renaming Program I mentioned a while back? Well, I used Python to program it, and in some of my spare time I've added in some extra features. I'm hoping in the next few weeks to be able to share the improved Photo Renaming program with you, so watch this space! While I'm at it, if you have a better name for it than "Photo Renamer" please leave a comment below, I'd love a slightly more pretty name!

The other course we've been doing is really cool and I hope will be useful for future endeavours - it's an Android App programming course and this weekend our course project is due. We've had to create a simple app that changes squares of colours on the screen depending on the position of a slider. See in the two pictures above, how in the left image, the slider is on the left hand side and the right hand image, the slider has been slid all the way to the right hand side. I did that! And, those are screen shots from my actual phone. There's also a video that you can see, just click here. For most people, this probably wouldn't be that interesting or exciting, but I beg to differ! It's the start of actually being able to program an app, which is awesome! We've had to create apps from a blank canvas which has been a good way of consolidating the last few weeks worth of learning to make sure we actually understand what's going on in the course.

Keep an eye out for my second Quote of the Week which will be posted at some stage next week. It's a new feature that I'm starting to help keep me blogging more - so I hope you enjoy it! Here's the first one, for those who missed it. Don't forget you can follow me on Instagram as I will also be posting the quotes there.

* Which is probably part of the reason that I haven't had as much time to dedicate to blogging as usual recently.