Welcome

Welcome to Scotti’s blog!

As part of the website finally being deployed, I thought that I should make the first post a bit of an introduction to me and what I’m going to put in to this blog and what I’m hoping to get out of it as well.

Who am I?

I’m a mid-thirties engineer who has had an on-again/off-again relationship with programming over my years in education and since I’ve been working full time. I’ve always enjoyed the parts of my education and working life that have involved programming, and I’ve used different programming languages to help out with various repetitive tasks. To give you a rough idea of what I’ve done (and how long ago it was!), here’s a short list of my programming experience:

  • Assembly (long ago and not exactly relevant any more!)
  • C++ (long ago)
  • COMAL (long ago and, again, not exactly relevant)
  • PASCAL (long ago)
  • VBA

That was all before I saw the light during 2016, which takes me to: why am I doing this now?

Why

Beware: the start of the nerdy talk is beginning…

In 2016 I started playing an MMORPG called Eve Online, and after a while I started my own in-game corporation (the Eve equivalent to a player group or guild) with some people I’d been playing with. CCP Games (the Eve Online developer) provides players with a wealth of information that can be requested from the game server via API calls. A lot of the large or more organised Eve corporations leverage this to give their members access to cool and useful third-party apps and tools to assist them.

As someone trying to help others (and themself!) I thought it would be great if I could offer something to my members too, so I started looking in to how to access the Eve servers and what I could do with the information. As I looked through this, I decided that I should build a corporation website allowing authorised members to get access to the corporation information to assist with in-game activities.

So, without having heard of the language before, I started looking in to Python (as recommended to me by another Eve Online player), and began my first Python project. Obviously it this was a much bigger take that I’d envisioned at the start (who’d have thought!), but over the next 6-18 months I worked away during lunch breaks, evenings and weekends to pull together the website and the services required to get it up and running.

This reintroduction to programming and my first experience with Python has lead me to this point. I’ve loved my time learning so far and I’m going to be continuing with this journey as long as my motivation holds, though 4 years and counting is quite promising! As my journey has progressed, I found myself wanting to record a lot of what I’ve learned in a more formal format than the notes I’d taken so far and, along with a new interest in privacy and security, I thought that now might be the time to start blogging about this. Despite being a decade late to the trend!

What will this blog be about?

As I’m sure that you have guessed, the majority of what I’ll be writing about will be programming related. Whether or not this is worth reading for others, I think that this will be good experience, allowing me to practice my writing skills (used only for reports these days), but also in order to record things for me to look up later. However, it’s likely to also have other posts and articles regarding other topics that I find interesting.

Without setting things too much in stone, the major topics that I’ll try to keep to will be:

  • Programming
  • Privacy
  • Productivity

And, in keeping with the theme of ‘P’, probably some personal things as well.

Programming

Programming is such a huge catch-all topic, but most of what I’ve been doing and what I hope to be doing, will fall into three main areas.

My next steps on this blog will mainly be around cataloguing what I’ve done and what useful information or learnings that I’ve had along the way. My first article will likely be on the journey from newbie to not-as-newbie as I created my Eve website (the next post) Ideally, I’d like to have a series of posts or articles for each of my major projects completed, but that might depend on how good my notes and memory is…

Web development

I really enjoyed my time creating the Eve Online website and despite having never had to ssl in to a remote server previously, I’ve now got a few remote servers that I manage for various websites and projects that I’ve created and am currently working on.

Scripting

As part of using Python, I’ve ran through a number of different tutorials and online courses now (shout-out to Al Sweigart’s Automate the Boring Stuff with Python) and so I’ve done a bit of script writing for various tasks.

A number of the scripts have been work-related for things like transforming data from one state to another, or automatic creation of documents or templates. These have been massive time-savers and useful for building up a code-snippets catalogue that I can refer to later.

Data science/engineering

Whilst this is probably a topic in it’s own right, I’ll shoe-horn this in to the programming section as that’s likely to be the focus for most of it. I’ve always had an interest in organising, filtering and manipulating data, and I also enjoy producing reports or summaries from data, so it really should not have taken me as long as it did to enrol myself in a data science degree.

Studying online and part-time has been challenging me for sure, but it’s also been very rewarding so far and it’s definitely something that seems to go hand-in-hand with Python! I’ve been learning a bit of R as part of the course and will likely continue this outside of the degree study too.

Privacy

Over the past year I’ve been focused on reducing my online presence (and yet I’m starting a blog!?) and increasing my online security as well. As more information comes out about vulnerabilities that have affected people and with more services and information being present online, I’ve been increasingly concerned about all things privacy and security.

I’ve read so many articles, blogs, Reddit posts and other media on the topic and I’ve started to try to implement as many of the practices that I’ve read about myself. So, similar to the programming topic, I’d like to start to record some of this for my benefit, and maybe it will help others too.

Productivity

As part of my working life and whatever hobby I’m into at the time, I’m always interested in how other people do things and what tools they use. I’ve forever trying to create better ways of tracking the things that I do (one day I might build something that works…) and some of the habits I’ve been working on have been in the pursuit of better productivity.

Some of the podcasts and articles that I read are focused on this so I expect some posts will be talking about this subject.

Personal

I’m sure that it will come as no surprise by this point to hear/read that I’m a bit of a nerd! As much as I will try to keep the blog focused, some of my nerdy tendencies might burst out, so there might be some posts about gaming, RPG’s, data tracking, and who knows what else.

Closing

Having never done anything like this before, you’ll have to bear with me as I get to grips with the format, layout and style of whatever I write. I’m not going to lie, this is probably the fourth [edit: 5th] draft of this initial post (and the third method of creating the site in the first place!) so I expect that things will evolve over time, but that’s also part of what I enjoy about things like this. It’s always good to be able to look back at what you’ve done and I think that’s an excellent summary for what I’d like to achieve with this blog!