This month I wanted to talk about my favourite applications of tech, communication and assistive tech in general. I’m not talking about messaging platforms or other ways tech enhances our day to do communication but rather how tech can be used to give people a voice who struggle to communicate in a ‘traditional’ way. The classic example of this is Steven Hawkings who would used an eye control system to verbalise what he wanted to say. I often think his communication was misrepresented, when you saw him on TV talking about his latest research he wasn’t using his communication aid in real time. He would have had to take a long time inputting what he wanted to say, not to mention his super unique setup. General purpose communication devices aren’t going to be intended for someone to use long scientific words that he needs on a daily basis, luckily he had the means to have one adapted for his needs.

Tis the season, for having fun learning about tech again. Seriously though, first semester was a bit grim and I had to spend a lot of time learning in great detail about areas of computing that I’m not interested. On the bright side it made me learn things that I never would have chosen to. In contrast I spent most of December just doing anything that I found interesting or excited.

This month kicked off catching up on work that had been put off because of my trip last month down to Google. I started by completed an assignment for Computer Vision. The part of the assignment I completed was pretty simple, I created a composite image generator in Matlab. I didn’t learn a huge amount about Computer Vision but I can now debug a Matlab script pretty efficiently but I amnt sure thats a skill i want to have.

This month I am going to change things up a little from the usual format, I’m going to reflect on what I learnt this month in general rather than talking about a specific project. This is mainly because this month I took part in Glasgow Uni Hackathon as well as an event at Google so I really want to focus on them. I’m really keen to hear what people think about this new approach to my blog so message me on LinkedIn if you have any feedback or suggestions.

In this installment of git ready I set out to become the worlds best ethical hacker. Unfortunately I didn’t achieve this goal. However, I did come away with a huge respect for the information security sector as well as a want to become part of it.

I started out this month with the plan to create a GraphQL API that communicates with the API that data.police.uk provide to access crime statistics and information about police forces in specific areas. After that my plan was to build a React app that allowed the user to drop a pin on the map and then be presented with the crime statistics for that area. Lastly, I wanted to gain experience in deploying a web app into a production environment using a CI pipeline.

Welcome to my new, and first, blog series cleverly name git ready. This series will be a post at the end of every month about a project that I have spent the month working on. Each post will outline what I am trying to achieve and learn and then I will contrast that with reflections on how the project went and what I actually learnt and what I plan to take forward.