On Sunday 19th May, I shall be cycling a 50 mile route from Stoke-on-Trent to Market Drayton, on to Nantwich and back to Stoke. Having only done a small amount of training in the last few weeks I’m not sure I’m totally prepared but I fully intend to complete all 50 miles no matter how long it takes!
GIT is a de-centralised version control system. A version control system manages the state of a ‘repository’ as it is called. A repository can contain an entire application, a single file or something in between. A version control system keeps a history of all changes in the repository. This is handy for a person working on their own in that they can access previous changes to their work if they find they are going down the wrong route. It is especially useful for teams of people working on the same work. Multiple people can contribute their changes and the entire history is available to everyone in the team.
Last week, I took part in NASA’s space apps challenge – an international hackathon that took place over 48 hours in 83 countries around the world. Over 9000 people took part and with over 50 challenges to choose from it was great fun. I’ve not taken part in a hackathon before and although I was unable to attend an event in person (the nearest event to me was either York or Leicester. There were also events in London, Exeter and Glasgow) I still had a great time using technologies I’ve not used before.
I thought I would start this post with some definitions.
Professional - A person following a profession, especially a learned profession.
Amateur - A person who engages in an art, science, study, or athletic activity as a pastime rather than as a profession.
As concrete as these definitions appear to be, I believe there is more and more overlap these days. People with hobbies in Astronomy, Art, Sport, Computer programming etc are making greater and greater contributions to their fields of interest.
I recently had a massive purge of ‘friends’ on Facebook because I’m tired of getting sucked into reading about things I’m not remotely interested in. Facebook is addictive – and the only way to fight addiction is to control it. Going one step further, I want to use various social platforms for only what I see is most beneficial to me. So from now on, you can expect to me online in the following places for the following reasons:
In my Cosmology module, we had to read and understand about the basic particles and their interactions and so I thought I would create a diagram to help me remember how particles are classified, e.g. an electron is a lapton and a fermion etc…
Hopefully others will find this useful too. I intend to compliment this diagram with another one to show how the various particles interact and the forces between them some time in the near future.
If you spot any mistakes, let me know…
