Lori M Olson OPED ― Our Unvarnished Opinion
Today I’m going to take some of my own advice. It’s June 10th and today is #ShutdownAcademia and #ShutdownSTEM day. If you don’t know what that means… it’s part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, and it means that we privileged people in academia and in STEM professions need to shut up. We need to stay quiet and leave room for the voices of the black people and the other people who experience racism every day and hear their lived experiences. And if you absolutely have to speak up today, there’s only one thing you should say. Find someone who has experienced racism and say, “I’m listening”. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
I’m listening.
FITS ― Featured in the School
The WNDXSchool’s new intern, Jordan, is hard at work on updates for the DragonRuby Game Toolkit tutorial at DragonRuby School. It should be out before too much longer. And as soon as he finishes that, we’ll be working on a new DRGTK series. Do you have ideas for new DRGTK tutorials or courses? Hit Reply and let us know what you’d like to see!
DRSH ― Dragon Riders Slack Highlights
From time-to-time we like to remind readers about other great resources available to the DragonRuby community. One of the best is the Dragon Riders Slack team. All manner of things both big and small are discussed. A great example is the kinda scary looking crash dump posted by Martin Kolb recently. He had the resolution in just 15 minutes. By the way, if you’re using Python 3, you’re absolutely going to care about what the fixed turned out to be.
ANDROID ― Nothin’ but…
Another great resource is Material, which is Google’s “adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that support the best practices of user interface design.” No, we didn’t know that, either. We also like that Aneke Peter recently riffed in Hacker Noon about the new MaterialDatePicker and then contributed a brief tutorial on how to use it. Date pickers are hard, so it’s nice when it all comes together like this.
GOTW ― Gem of the Week
While the term ray casting may not be familiar to everyone, if you’ve played any first-person shooter video game from Wolfenstein 3D onwards you’ve seen it and benefitted from it. It creates just enough of the 3D world to convince you that all of it exists and makes the experience immersive. In any event, returning from our little sojourn down memory lane, there’s a great new lo-fi ray caster for DragonRuby from sojastar. It’s a work in progress but looks really impressive so far.
COMM ― Community
One of the oldest (as in we’ve known him for a long time and not that he’s…um…never mind) and best friends of the school is the Agile Samurai himself Jonathan Rasmussen. We’ve always been in awe of Jonathan’s rare combination of technical and teaching skills. We were recently reminded that he has great introductory videos on iOS development. Sure, it’s Swift but you can always learn something useful, right? Check out this recent effort on Extracting Views.
AHTW ― App Highlight This Week
So, you know there is a great and entirely cost-free way of promoting your app, right? You’re looking at it. And until you finally step forward and unveil your masterpiece for all the world to see we are forced to put this forlorn placeholder here instead of you. Greatness awaits. If you’ll just let us know about your app.
DRGTK ― DragonRuby Game Toolkit
We’re in utter awe of this initiative of itch.io: they have brought together the efforts of 790 creators (including our good friend Amir Rajan) in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. It’s over a 1000 items (including the DRGTK!) for just $5, all proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Community Bail Fund.
But here’s the real headline. The effort has already raised nearly $3 million towards a goal $5 million. Yeah, stunning. Thanks to James Paley of COGconnected for bringing this to our attention. It’s a time-limited offer, so you best get to it. Everybody wins.
TWIL ― This Week I Learned
Like reading log files from newest-to-oldest? In other words, in reverse chronological order? Then you need to print the file in reverse order. Seriously, that’s a thing, right? If so, here’s the fairly simple Unix command from FolksTalk to do just that.
HAHA ― And They All Laughed
Just received a one star review? Don’t despair, it may not mean what you think it means. We’re laughing, but also crying a little on the inside.
That’s a Wrap!
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“Computers are good at following instructions, but not at reading your mind.” ― Donald Knuth