A process I developed for Georgetown Law Library’s Digital Initiatives department, December 2016 […]

HDD = hard drive doomed

A few months ago, in the midst of a midsemester crunch, I had to replace a failing hard drive on the old Dell desktop that I use as sort of my “master” computer. I do some cloud backups, but a lot of stuff like thousands of FLAC files ripped from a thousand old CDs doesn’t need to really need to sit on a remote server.

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Introducing Spect, Part 2

In 2015, I began a bit of a career shift from “generalist with solid tech skills” to “brogrammer wizzzard.” Ok, not really. But after a long period of working with library metadata I moved to a new position in my library’s Digital Initiatives department. Around the same time I began a long-delayed MLIS program. My technical knowledge increased rapidly. I had to dive immediately into databases and command-line tools, then quickly pivoted to geniune coding. I began to take an interest in Python on the advice of my supervisor — we’re working on a major project with the Internet Archive and much of their technical infrastructure is built in Python. I took some of an MIT EdX Python class and then, as part of an “information architecture” class, a Codecademy Python course. I learned a fair amount despite hating the way “Codecademy” is spelled.

These courses were the first time I have ever done any formal(ish) programming training. I can trace my primitive coding skillz back a long way though. As a kid I can remember going through examples from a book on BASIC on an old Apple II, and even remember a lot of details like using ? as a shortcut for PRINT:

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