Author: Graham Lavender

eBooks Symposium! The Current State of the Art in Libraries

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I attended a symposium and wrote a blog post about it: eBooks: Current State in Libraries, published on the Dysart & Jones blog.

On March 17 & 18, I had the pleasure of attending eBooks Symposium! The Current State of the Art in Libraries at the University of Toronto iSchool. The room was filled with mainly public librarians from across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), though some came from as far as Ottawa.  There were a number of vendors in attendance (not just including those who gave presentations). The many insights into the world of ebooks wouldn’t all fit into a blog post, but I will share some of the highlights.

Visit Dysart & Jones to read the full post.

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Career update

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I never intended for this blog to be a series of updates on my career path, but, well, people have asked, so here I am.

In November 2015, I officially started my current role as Associate Librarian at the Michener Institute of Education at UHN. The Michener Institute is a post secondary institution specializing in the applied health sciences; students train to become Medical Laboratory Technologists, Respiratory Therapists, Nuclear Medicine Technologists, and more.

It’s a small team in the Learning Resource Centre, which means I have a lot of variety in my work, and it also means we have the ability to make changes to policies and procedures quickly, to figure out what works best for students and faculty. Having Juanita Richardson as my supervisor is a blast, and we’ve hired a talented U of T iSchool grad for the summer: Aurelia Engstrom brings her expertise in User Experience design to create recommendations for our website and for our social media presence. (If you’re looking to hire someone for a UX role, Aurelia is the person for you – but not until she’s finished here, please!)

This year I’m also a co-planner for the OLITA division of the OLA Super Conference. The submissions are in, and it looks like we will have some fantastic sessions at #olasc17! You should go ahead and put February 1-4, 2017 into your calendar, if you haven’t done so already.

Checking in

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This is just a brief post to let everyone know where I’m at. The last time I wrote was just before starting World of Webcraft last summer, so I’ll pick things up from there.

I met a fantastic group of people in the program, and I learned way more about Drupal than I’d ever expected. I would have been happy to stick around at Myplanet, but in the end they decided they weren’t able to hire any of the Webcrafters (and from the looks of things, they won’t be offering the program again).

In September, I received a call from Tim and Vince at The Pixel Shop, where I had worked briefly a few months earlier. They needed a Project Manager, so I started a new contract with them. In many ways, the role was similar to my previous Liaison Librarian roles; it involved working with clients to understand their needs, and then working with the designers and developers to make sure those needs were met. One of my major projects was the redesigned Dufflet website, which was a lot of fun, though it was sometimes frustrating to look at pictures of delicious desserts all day!

My contract ended a couple of weeks ago, so now I’m ready for something new. The possibilities at the intersection of information and technology are endless, so I’m sure I’ll find something challenging and interesting.

My next adventure: World of Webcraft at Myplanet

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Next week I’ll be starting my next adventure in coding: the World of Webcraft program at Myplanet. It’s a bit like an internship, but they call it a “hands-on educational program.” I’ll spend 3 days a week for 12 weeks at the Myplanet office, first learning about the tools and processes they use (including Drupal, JavaScript, agile methodologies, and more), and later putting these skills to work by contributing to real life Myplanet projects.

I’ve already been in touch with my 11 classmates via email, and I think they’ll be a fun bunch to work with; the vast majority are alumni of either Bitmaker or HackerYou, so we should all be at a similar point in developing our skills. I’ll be sure to post updates on how things go.

Time flies

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It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole month, but my contract at The Pixel Shop is over. The principals, Vince and Tim, took the whole team out for frozen yogurt on Friday in honour of my last day, which was fun, but it was sad to say my goodbyes. I managed to learn a lot over the month in terms of what really goes on behind the scenes when it comes to web design and development. The coding skills I brought with me came in handy, but now I have some real world experience as well.

I’m on the lookout for my next challenge – wish me luck (again)!

My awesome new job at The Pixel Shop

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I promised I would post updates on my career situation, and I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve started work as a UX Designer / Interface Developer at The Pixel Shop. What exactly does that fancy title mean? Well, I’m going to be taking on a variety of roles on various projects. Some of it will be front end development, but I’ll also be doing some information architecture, usability testing, and more. Update: In the end, I didn’t do any development or usability testing over the course of this one-month contract. The majority of my work involved marking up text into HTML and entering it into a CMS, as well as testing sites by viewing them on various devices and browsers. Other tasks included information architecture, conversion of images among various filetypes, and creation of copy decks for English text that needed to be sent off for translation into French.

I was first introduced to Vince and Tim from The Pixel Shop a few weeks ago, at Hiring Week for Bitmaker’s 5th cohort. Of course, I was a student in cohort 4, but when the following cohort’s Hiring Week rolled around and I still wasn’t employed, the Bitmaker staff invited me to join in. From there, things moved quickly: our initial chat at Bitmaker was on a Wednesday, then they invited me for a follow up at the office the following Monday, they made me an offer the day after that, and I started work that Wednesday.

I’m really enjoying the experience. I work with a great team, on projects for a variety of clients ranging from small non-profits to big corporations. Every day it’s something new, whether I’m updating existing code or coming up with a new structure for a site that’s being completely overhauled, so there’s never a dull moment. Plus, the location is fantastic, and my commute is about 25 minutes by bike.

Life is good!

Why you should check out Startup Weekend Toronto EDU: Library Edition

Graham Lavender 1 Comment

Originally posted at http://toronto.startupweekend.org/2014/03/07/why-you-should-check-out-startup-weekend-toronto-edu-library-edition/

Are you a librarian, a developer, or a designer? Can you spend the weekend of March 28 – 30 in Toronto? If so, you should absolutely check out Startup Weekend Toronto EDU: Library Edition. Read on to find out why.

First things first: what is SWTOLib all about? Developers may already be familiar with the Startup Weekend concept: people from diverse backgrounds come together and form teams to take innovative ideas from the concept stage to lay the groundwork for startup businesses. If this sounds intimidating, it shouldn’t; you’ll be surrounded by like-minded individuals who are all working toward the goal of improving libraries through technology. If you’re a librarian, you don’t need any technical experience, and developers and designers don’t need to know much about libraries. You can find all the details on the SWTOLib event page and on Twitter: @SWTOLib, but I’m here to tell you why you should join in. There are a ton of good reasons; here are 5 of the best:

  1. You’ll meet some amazing people. (Aside to librarians: developers aren’t so bad, if you give them a chance; aside to developers: same goes for librarians). You might meet your future business partner, and even if you don’t, the bonds you form here are sure to have a lasting impact on your professional network.
  2. Everyone loves libraries (except, perhaps, the mayor and his brother). Even if you haven’t been to a library in years, you can surely imagine the possibilities when free access to information meets bleeding-edge technology. Help build the future for citizens of the world.
  3. You’ll have the chance to work on cool ideas you might not have the opportunity to try out at work. Even if you work somewhere as awesome as Google, you can’t spend *all* your time doing whatever tickles your fancy, so come try out some wild ideas.
  4. You’ll be part of something massive. Over 45,000 people have participated in Startup Weekend, in countries all around the world. Or, if you’re more into exclusivity, consider that you’ll be among the very first to harness the power of Startup Weekend and aim it at libraries.
  5. No matter how many good ideas you have coming in, you’ll have even more when you’re finished. Even if you don’t actually launch a new business venture, the ideas you’ve worked on will continue to percolate in your mind for the weeks and months following the event, so make sure you connect on LinkedIn (or trade business cards, if you’re old school like that) with all the amazing people you meet, because your project may very well take on a life of its own.

So go sign up now! I’ll be there as a mentor, which means I’ll be floating around and helping groups however I can. I hope to see you there!

On the job hunt

Graham Lavender 3 Comments

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was researching the web development program at Bitmaker Labs, I learned a lot by reading the blogs of previous students. Unfortunately, many of them stopped blogging when they finished the course, which I found to be terribly frustrating because I wanted to know what they ended up doing with their newly acquired skills.

This is just a quick post to assure you, my dear readers, that I will keep you up to date as to my post-Bitmaker career-relevant activities. At the moment, I’m treating finding a job as a full-time job, which means networking (e.g., meeting people for coffee and attending tech-related social events, which are two things I enjoy doing anyway), checking job boards, and keeping my skills sharp (e.g., through Code School). I’ve also started a personal project I’m not quite ready to announce on here yet. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Code School vs. Codecademy: Where are the best coding tutorials?

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More than a year and a half ago, I wrote a post about my experience using Codecademy, and to this day it’s one of the most popular posts on my blog. Since then, I’ve tried several different online tutorials for learning to code, so today I want to talk about one of my new favourites, Code School. Let’s see how it stacks up against Codecademy.

You may be wondering why I’m spending time on tutorials now that I’ve completed the program at Bitmaker Labs, but any expert will tell you that learning to code is a lifelong pursuit. There are always new techniques to master and new tools to discover. Both of the sites I’m discussing here have a lot to offer intermediate and even senior developers.

Code School logo

Code School covers a variety of coding topics. Most of these topics are grouped under paths (Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and iOS), while a few are classified as electives (including Git and Chrome DevTools). In addition to these “courses,” there is an extensive list of screencasts available on related subjects, but so far I’ve stuck to the courses, so I won’t be discussing the screencasts.

Each course is broken down into 5 or 6 lessons (or “levels,” to use Code School’s gamified language), and each of these sections features a video lecture followed by several exercises (“challenges”). The quality of the lectures is quite good; the instructor is usually shown in a corner of the screen, while the code takes up most of the window, with slick but non-distracting animations, notes, and highlights indicating relevant portions. The videos tend to be 10-20 minutes in length, which is of course much shorter than a traditional lecture. I sometimes find my attention wandering a bit by the end of a video, though, and I feel they could improve the experience by breaking them up into even shorter segments. Having said that, there’s nothing stopping you from hitting pause if you need a break to soak in what you’ve just learned.

The challenges following the lectures use the same general format as Codecademy’s exercises. The site presents you with a customized coding environment in the browser and asks you to solve a problem using the techniques you’ve just learned. One thing I particularly like about the challenges is that you have the option to view the lecture you just watched in PDF slide format, which makes it easy to remind yourself of the most important points of the lecture without having to sit through the entire video again. Each challenge comes with a set of (usually 3) progressively more revealing hints, so if you’re struggling you can get some help without having the whole answer given to you. If you still can’t figure it out, you have the option of accessing the answer, though this will cause you to earn fewer points on that particular challenge.

As I’ve mentioned, Code School makes use of gamification: you earn points for each challenge and badges for each level. Codecademy takes a similar approach, but I found Code School’s implementation to be less obtrusive. Codecademy seemed to be always reminding me of my “achievements,” while in Code School I found it easier to ignore this aspect of the experience. To be fair, though, I think Codecademy has toned it down a bit since I first wrote about them; there is now more of an emphasis on progressing through a track (equivalent to a Code School path) and less on accumulating brightly coloured badges.

So how do these two options compare?

  • I haven’t counted up the topics covered, but at this point in time both sites have an impressive array of choices, so there’s no clear winner based on variety. If you’re looking to learn a particular tool, though, this may influence your choice; for example, Python is only available on Codecademy, while you can only learn about iOS on Code School.
  • In terms of lecture quality, I definitely prefer Code School’s videos over Codecademy’s purely text-based approach. The videos are engaging, and I find they help me visualize what my code is doing behind the scenes. There’s a cheesy jingle at the beginning of each course, but you can skip ahead in the video if they bug you as much as they bug me. I also prefer Code School’s exercises, but there’s a less significant difference here.
  • Codecademy has more of a community feel to it. From the beginning, they have encouraged users to create their own courses for others to learn from (which of course wouldn’t be realistic for Code School’s video-based approach), and there is an active forum where students help each other learn.
  • Hmmm, I guess I haven’t mentioned this part yet: Codecademy is free, while Code School costs $29 per month (or a bit less if you pay per year).

For the moment, I’ve decided Code School’s polished interface and engaging videos are worth paying for. It especially makes sense for me right now because I’m spending a lot of time honing my skills, so I use the site often enough to feel that I’m getting my money’s worth. However, I think both options are great ways to build your skills, whether you’re totally new to coding or have been doing it for a while. Code School offers a number of basic courses for free, so I would highly recommend giving them a try, and go ahead and check out Codecademy while you’re at it.

If you’re looking for more resources, Michelle Glauser has compiled an excellent list (the table is a bit awkward to read on that page, so I recommend clicking through to the full Google spreadsheet).

Hiring Week at Bitmaker Labs

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Jan 13 – 17, 2014 was Hiring Week for the 4th cohort of students at Bitmaker Labs. What’s Hiring Week all about? I’m glad you asked.

As you may have guessed, Hiring Week is when students have the opportunity to interview with a number of different organizations, most of which are Toronto-based tech companies. In total, 16 organizations participated (including 3 talent agencies and one individual representing a handful of startups):

The Bitmaker staff had put together an online Hiring Board, where each student created a profile, highlighting our social media presence and uploading our resumes, and each organization posted some information about what they do and what types of positions they were hiring for. In some cases, companies had specific job postings they were looking to fill, while others were scoping out talent to keep in mind for the next time they hire.

Each organization indicated which morning or afternoon they would be coming to Bitmaker. Then, students could request interviews with whichever companies interested them, and the companies could also send requests to students whose profiles had caught their eye. Some organizations were more selective than others when deciding how many interview requests to accept, but most were happy to talk to as many interested students as possible. Finally, Lidia (Director of Community & Student Experience at Bitmaker) went through all the accepted requests and fit them into 20-minute time slots.

Naturally, 20 minutes is not very long for a job interview, so most of the conversations focused on how well the students would fit the company’s work culture, and what non-coding skills we would bring. Some organizations asked a few technical questions, but in most cases they saved those for a second round of interviews.

As you can imagine, it was an intense week (I had 13 interviews), and the hiring process isn’t over yet. Like many of my classmates, I’m still scheduling follow up interviews with some employers and waiting to hear back from others. Keep your fingers crossed for me!