Spielend programmieren

teaching vpython to children

Horst JENS — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:00:20 GMT

I run a small python teaching business in Vienna, Austria teaching the Python programming language. During the summer vacation, I teach every week a new group of children, typically for 15 hours (9:00 a.m. until 12:00 a.m., from Monday until Friday).

As my last group consisted of only two girls and a boy (aged 11 and 12 years old), I decided to experiment a bit and center the whole course around vpython - a python library to create and animate 3D objects. It was not my first attempt to teach vpython to children, but my first time to do so in a summer course setting.

Visiting Europython conference with a 2 year old child

Horst JENS — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 09:16:20 GMT

I enjoyed many Europython conferences in my life, but 2023 was my first time trying to combine the full family life (wife, mother-in-law and very active 2 year old son) with a visit to the Europython 2023 conference in Prague, Czech Republic.

Background information: Both my wife and my mother in law come from Odesa, Ukraine. We live in Vienna, Austria where i run a small business teaching Python to children and adults. Recently, my wife started learning Python as well to help out with my programming courses for children. As she needs a new career path anyway after the baby break, i wanted to introduce her to the python community so that she can see "python people" (aside from me) herself and look for career opportunities in the tech field.

The Europython conference organisators offered child care during the conference and we took my mother-in-law with us to have an babysitter for the evenings... we even dreamed about going out dancing after the conference. So far the dreams.

youtube video about creating slideshows with python, csv and reveal.js

Horst JENS — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 05:12:20 GMT

My friend Dennis had to create a presentation with images, the image filenames (and some other data) were stored in a big csv file (=comma separated values. An easy-to-write file format for spreadsheet data).

beautiful interactive chart showing top programming languages 2021

Horst JENS — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 03:52:20 GMT

While browsing my Email inbox 5:00 a.m. I made the half conscious decision to click on an article from the "Pycoder's weekly" newsletter. The click linked to an IEEE Spectrum blogpost with the title "Top Programming Languages 2021: Python dominates as the de facto platform for new technologies" and I read a bit deeper, because of the first sentence ("Learn Python") and because: who does not love to get ones own prejudices confirmed by external sources? I do!

concatenate images and bulk rename images using python, pillow and PySimpleGUI

Horst JENS — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 05:12:20 GMT

After my friend Dennis showed me his video about "merging" images, I discovered this excellent blog-post 'Concatenate images with Python, Pillow' of note.nkmk.me and decided to create my own tools with python, pillow and PySimpleGUI:

A simple Image macro tool to generate Internet Memes or greeting card photos, consisting of a GUI that allows to concatenate several images together into one big merged image and optionally add a text message to it.

How to convert dokuwiki links into markdown using regex

Horst JENS — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 20:00:20 GMT

While I was always aware of the fact that regular expressions (regex) are a very powerful search-and-replace tool, I hardly ever used them in practice. For my humble needs, the built-in search-and-replace tool of my favorite text editor Geany is more than sufficient. From time to time, when I run into complex cases, I usually write a small Python script.

This morning, while converting old Dokuwiki-shownotes pages from my podcast into markdown format, I finally gave in: I wanted to solve a task using regular expressions.

The task was already solved inside a larger hand-written python script of mine, but I thought it would be nice to have a singular regex string that I can copy/paste into the search-replace dialog of Geany.

The task is this one:

convert a hyperlink from dokuwiki's format into markdown format.

example:

source: (dokuwiki format) [[https://geany.org|Geany text editor]]

desired result (markdown format): [Geany text editor](https://geany.org)

How to config nikoa for multi-lingual websites

Horst JENS — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 10:12:20 GMT

I love the python programming language, and i really like static site generators, but nikola, the static site generator writtin in Python, was not love at first sight for me.

While i liked the concept of nikola, the clear-written, good looking documentation (written -of course- with nikola) and the apparently active community behind it, i struggled to fully understand the concept of how to make a bi-lingual (or multi-lingual) homepage with it.

In the end i managed it more by luck and intuition than by understanding, so I provide my findings with the hope others may struggle less long than I did to get their desired ouput.

use case: homepage with blog

I wanted a homepage with one main language (German) and some (but not all) pages translated into English. I also wanted a blog where some postings are in German, some are in English, and some -but not all- postings are translated in both languages.

first steps

Heading th the nikola homepage, i followed the install instructions and the I want a homepage, not a blog article.

in the end, my 'pages' folder