Online Meetup - Weekly Poll

[Will]

Hey everyone.
We’re still trying to keep online sessions going - if you have any suggestions on what might work for you, please let us know.

Wednesday meetups now online

** We’re now meeting online on Wednesdays at 7pm using Zoom - join the call here. ** Tech Shed: Online What to expect in a tech shed Wednesday online session … Using the tools we have at hand, and not being in the same physical space, the sessions have to be a bit different, a bit more focussed. We’re evolving this as we go, so hopefully we can refine this to allow people to get the most out of sessions while we’re not meeting in person. You don’t have to join with video turned on if tha…

Weekly Poll Suggestions

Here’s my current list for possible topics for a poll. I’ve carried them over from last week, but made a new topic to help make it visible.

It’s pretty much all coding-based as microcontrollers etc. are a bit trickier to colab on on video chat (might be doable, but could be a bit one-sided).

• Explore video via web RTC - pretty topical, kind of interesting, doesn’t look that hard
  • We’ve had some questions on getting people set up on Zoom - in theory, this should be easier as there’s nothing to install - it works in a browser e.g. https://rtcmulticonnection.herokuapp.com/demos/
• Town search for lockdown - most sources of info on food delivery etc. are curated lists of links (basically a bit of a Google vs the Yahoo directory listings appearing across social media & Wordpress sites)
  • Is a local search based on scraping this info & presenting it well useful? Doable? A valid approach?
  • While thinking about this, I did wonder why Google hasn’t made a move - seems like it would be relatively trivial from the heir position - the only thing (aside from their COVID info features) I could find was a story suggesting Google Maps had a new feature but it only seems to be for standard takeaways, not the wider range of businesses currently offering help, or volunteer orgs etc.
• Basic python web projects - e.g. Flask API or Django - a few people are learning or want to learn python, so a reasonable code
• Firebase for rapid project dev - tried it for the first time in years last week - interesting option for getting something off the ground, also has realtime synching to the browser, so potential for live colab apps
• Cloud hosting/serverless functions etc. - I’m only starting out, but good to work through something
• Machine learning - e.g. find a classification task, a non image task and apply image classifcation to that (or try something from PapersWithCode again)
• Toy Library

An thoughts on the above or suggestions are welcome as always.

[Ed_S]

What I’m enjoying about the present weekly chats is the sense of connection. I’d like to see a space where each of us can share and talk about any technical projects we’ve made progress on, anything that’s puzzling us, anything we’ve learnt, or things we’ve seen which seem interesting.

That is, the emphasis is on communication and sharing, rather than on doing. Because making actual progress in a group video call is quite ambitious.

A show-and-tell that covers something you’ve been doing or trying to do does fall into that, I think.

[Snowy]

I suppose that’s the main problem that I’ve been having the past few weeks, and why I have not been attending the online sessions - I’ve got nothing to share on the tech front, because I’ve not been focusing on it in recent weeks. As such, I feel like that I have nothing to really contribute to any given session.

[Ed_S]

That’s fair enough @Snowy - but if you do feel like staying in touch, or might be interested in any technical things which come up, you should feel free to join in - or just drop in for a bit.

(For myself, yesterday I was dealing with assembly language programming for two micros which no-one will have heard of… or to be slightly more accurate I was mostly a spectator as two others rolled up their sleeves and dug in.)