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Chris Svec joined us to talk about kids programming and how well the Joel Test has held up.

Svec’s son (“The Kid”) developed an interest in programming by playing games. Most of his programming desires are around building games of his own.

Any time we talk about kids and programming, Scratch comes up. It really is that neat and is The Kid approved. Some resources to get you started (actually, getting started is easy, you may want a book to do more than the basics):

• The Everything Kids' Scratch Coding Book: Learn to Code and Create Your Own Cool Games! by Jason Rukman
• Scratch 3 Programming Playground: Learn to Program by Making Cool Games by Al Sweigart (hey, we know that guy!)
• griffpatch on YouTube

Digipen.edu had two courses The Kid (and Svec) took. Both are free on YouTube:

• Introduction to Game Design Lessons
• DigiPen Basic Game Development Series

Finally, in a shockingly unrelated twist, we talked about the Joel Test for determining the health of a software development organization. No determination was made on how good The Kid finds his current position.

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Thea Flowers creates open source and open hardware craft synthesizers that use Circuit Python for customization. She also writes about the internals of the SAMD21.

Thea’s synthesizer modules are found at Winterbloom, including Castor & Pollux and the Big Honking Button. It is all open source hardware so you can find code and schematics on Thea’s github site: github.com/theacodes

Thea’s site is thea.codes. You can find her blog there with deeply technical and detailed posts such as The most thoroughly commented linker script (probably), The Design of the Roland Juno oscillators, and Understanding the SAMD21 Clocks. She’s on Twitter as Stargirl, @theavalkyrie.

For more information about the Eurorack, listen to Embedded 356: Deceive and Manipulate You with Leonardo Laguna Ruiz of Vult.

Chris and Elecia take an in-studio vacation, chatting about what they’ve been doing. A few technical topics came up, entirely unintentionally.

Shirts are on sale

James Webb Space Telescope Pop-Up Card

Spicy Honey

Github Codespaces lets you try out some code bases

Some quirks of C

How do breakpoints even work? (via Memfault’s Interrupt)

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Sarah Withee spoke with us about using an artificial pancreas, learning many programming languages, and FIRST robotics.

More about the Open Artificial Pancreas System can be found at OpenAPS.org or in their documentation. Some other pieces we talked about include:

• LoopKit: an automated insulin delivery app template for iOS github (some additional docs)
• AndroidAPS github (additional docs)
• Reilly Link is the communication method for some insulin pumps
• Orange Link is a Reilly Link compatible device to run OpenAPS

To get involved with FIRST robotics, the place to start is FIRSTInspires.org

Sarah’s website is GeekyGirlSarah.com. Her programming language comparison tool is Code Thesaurus: codethesaur.us/

If you want to see small algorithms written in different languages, check out Rosetta Code

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Chris and Elecia talk about house maintenance, blinking LEDs, paper engineering and more.

Cutting Mobius Strips Video: Tadashi Tokieda cuts various combinations of loops and Mobius loops - with surprising results.

festi.info/boxes.py generates boxes for laser cutting (or other SVG consuming device). Boxes.py is a python module that lets you programmatically generate the SVGs. (Github repo)

Amanda Ghassaei’s Sugarcube is a MIDI instrument using this SparkFun button pad. We also talked about the Mikroe 8800 Retro Click.

Elecia is taking Paper Engineering with Kelli Anderson. Chris is taking songwriting courses from School of Song.

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