Charles Dunlevy – Page 4

2020-02-292020-09-12

Zombies

zombie-warning

Every day I run into zombies. Well not physically, but I do see a lot of them on the streets downtown.

Whenever I get off the subway and step outside I see countless people walking around looking like zombies from B-movies.

There are drug addicts walking around aimlessly, some having conversations with imaginary adversaries, others singing.

There are also the so-called “normal” people… walking around staring into their smart phones without any awareness of their immediate surroundings.

After purchasing a coffee at Second Cup, I proceeded to ride the escalator to the street level of the shopping centre. During that short journey, I spotted at least 3 people with their faces glued to their smartphones, oblivious to the world around them.

Personally, I do not use my smartphones unless I stop and stand to the side. I believe that it is not safe to walk around while staring at your smartphone.

“zombie-warning” by This is Awkward is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

2020-02-282020-08-29

The End of Retail?

Photo by **Anna Shvets** from **Pexels**

With the ever-rising cost of real estate in the City of Toronto, along with the explosive growth of food delivery services, are we witnessing the end of bricks and mortar retail in this city?

I do not believe that change will be this drastic, but I am starting to believe that we are heading down a path where retail outlets will actually shrink in size and focus on takeout or pickup orders.

I have been to several restaurants and bars where there are not many guests inside. What I do see is an endless stream of Uber Eats, Skip The Dishes, and other delivery people picking up orders.

I have spoken with several staff at various establishments and am beginning to hear the same story… customers are not filling up the venues like they used to, but the kitchen is busier than ever.

Starbucks is one of many retail establishments that lets customers place orders online or via smartphone apps for pickup at the location of their choosing. This is a convenient service, but I fear we may end up with cafes which consist of a takeout counter and no in-house seating. Recently, a location near my office removed all seating. What was once the seating area is now a standing wait area for mobile order pickups.

This seems to be following the trend where people no longer do things publicly. For example, most people watch movies at home rather than go out to the movie theatre. We purchase music online via the web or mobile applications in place of going to record stores. We purchase ebooks instead of visiting bookstores. People go online for dating instead of going out and meeting people at bars, clubs, or social events. Now, instead of going out to dine, growing numbers of people are choosing to stay home and order delivery.

2019-04-21

Chaos aka Computer Programming

Sorry for the overly dramatic headline. Things are not that bad. What I’m discussing is the frantic pace of the computer programming and information technology industry.

I started learning to code December 2017. At the time, I was asked to assist in updating a spreadsheet template for our company. The major features were written in Visual Basic for Applications aka VBA.

I was familiar with Microsoft Excel but knew nothing of VBA. My colleague assisted me in learning VBA. By the end of the project, I found myself interested in computer programming again. The last time I was interested in programming was during middle school. I stopped messing with coding back then because I could not afford to buy a computer.

At work, I use Microsoft Excel extensively for everything. Outside of work, I use Google Sheets. This lead me to start to wonder if I could do some of the tasks done in Excel via VBA using Google Sheets. This is when I discovered Google Apps Script.

As it turns out, Google Apps Script is JavaScript for Google applications similar to VBA for Microsoft applications.

I quickly found the syntax more to my liking. I wanted to learn more and ended up studying JavaScript itself… The language of the web. Despite its many quirks, I really enjoyed studying JavaScript. I lost interest in VBA because I found its syntax “dirty” compared to JavaScript.

I was overwhelmed to learn that JavaScript and web developers use a bunch of frameworks such as React, Angular, etc. The JavaScript world became an overwhelming and intimidating place where I started to feel as though I could never become an expert because there simply are too many plug-ins, frameworks, etc.

Since JavaScript uses syntax based on the C language family I became curious about its often-confused-with-though-unrelated cousin, Java.

My new manager at work went out to buy me books to help with VBA and Java! The company was looking into adopting the Java language for in-house application development. Unfortunately he bought me a book for advanced Java developers.

I remained focused on JavaScript and eventually stopped learning VBA. I started to study Java alongside JavaScript.

Somehow I stumbled upon yet another computer programming language called Kotlin. Kotlin was recently selected by Google to be an official language for developing Android applications.

I looked into this new language because I heard a lot of positive buzz surrounding it. I was amazed to see how “beautiful” the code looked. The syntax is concise and clear. It is a JVM language but devoid of the boilerplate code which is common in Java.

I am currently learning React and GitHub. React is the most popular JavaScript framework. There is also React Native which is used to write programs to run on both Android and iOS. I recently purchased a book which covers both React and React Native.

GitHub is a source control platform used by developers around the world. It is very convenient to have your code hosted in the cloud and available to download to any computer you like. It is also great for open source collaboration.

I recently purchased a new Chromebook which has a Linux container! Linux is very popular in the developer community. I knew nothing about Linux until I bought this laptop. I now do all of my coding on the Chromebook via Linux. I can sync with GitHub and then pick up where I left off on one of my desktop PCs which run Windows. I may convert one of my old PCs to Linux.

The fabulous world of computer programming… it is fast-pace, ever-changing, and interesting. One simply cannot get bored in this field, though at times it can feel overwhelming.