Not-much-news Sunday

Well, I don’t have much in the way of news today. If you like Memphis basketball, turn on

  • ESPN2 at 3 PM for the Tigers vs. the South Florida Bulls
  • Fox Sports Southeast at 5 PM for the Grizzlies vs. the Golden State Warriors

My first non-holiday week with the new laptop has been a success. I’ve worked through 165 pages worth of examples from the data science/Python book I have been reading, learning the numpy and pandas libraries. I have installed Linux Mint and Ubuntu virtual machines on my laptop, although I’m thinking about getting rid of Linux Mint because it doesn’t prompt for a password when I sudo a command (i.e. run it with root/administrator privileges). That kind of bothers me. I have installed the Apache web server, PHP, and MySQL on the Ubuntu machine.

I still plan on making my study of Python and data science my main project, but I have a project in mind for PHP too. I want to build a REST API in PHP in three different ways: using the Laravel framework, using the Zend framework, and using the CodeIgniter library. I want to expose service endpoints that return JSON when called, then write client-side code to consume that data using Angular, React, and possibly one or two other client-side frameworks/libraries. Starting out, I won’t care if these projects look pretty, but eventually I want to apply the Twitter Bootstrap layout framework so they look good on both a phone and on a screen.

I want to build a portfolio on GitHub… it’s the kind of thing I should have done years ago, but I came home so mentally burned out from sitting in cubicle hell every day that I never had the motivation to do so.

For the first time in years I am excited about what I can do in the world of computing. Not for the sake of earning a paycheck, but because I enjoy it.

That’s it for now. Back tomorrow.