Week One - “Principles and Practices, Presentations, Project Management”


ASSIGNMENT #1

“plan and sketch a potential final project”



 

It's been two years since I started attempting to learn all the Fab Academy concepts and complete projects. In that time, I have never had a final project idea that I was excited about. I have been taking a lot of my own "Fab Zero" type of notes, though. And just recently, my friend and work associate David and I created and sold out a five class program of hands-on, delivered-to-your door, electronics learning kits for middle school aged learners.

So, I plan to build the ideas out for the kits even further. Instead of focusing on electronics, I plan to put together "Fab Fundamentals Kits and Curriculum" that we can use and share with other labs/learners.

 

WHY

We are beginning to have our own PCBs designed and manufactured as the cost of most retail solder kits is very expensive, especially when you consider how many we go through in the context of teaching young people to learn to solder. (In fact, we had one young boy in a class over this past Winter Break use five boards before he got it right.) I never want to not be able to say "yes" to that over concern about costs.



 

WorkChops is really blessed to now have and "Engineer in Residence" (Jeff) and he created our first board:



 

ASSIGNMENT #2

“work through a Git tutorial & build a personal site in the class archive describing you and your personal project”


WHAT HAPPENED (2019)

Prior to Fab Academy, I had ZERO exposure to anything Git. So I didn't only work through one tutorial. I think I have seen/heard/read/watched every Git tutorial in the world! I struggled through all of it, mostly because I don't speak the same (technical) language as people who have version control as part of their jobs/lives. In most tutorials, in fact, I had to Google search questions like, "What's an SSH Key?"

It has been a struggle to get used to using command line/terminal app as it's not something I typically use. The first computer I ever touched, you of course had to know text-based commands to open anything, but I gladly ditched using that kind of interface as computers became all easy apps and pointing & clicking through a path. Two weeks of struggling to learn how to "Git" had me very humble and appreciative of people who program and build all the devices I've been mindlessly using.I also decided to learn about shells/CLIs, package managers (I'm using Homebrew, of course), Python/pip on Mac, command line tools, Xcode.

I scrapped the 2019 Fab Academy suggestion of using MKDocs as I couldn't see a good reason to try and figure that out. I made this site in HTML/CSS, as it's something I do already know. I keep the w3schools HTML tutorial open as a Cheat Sheet. I plan to go back at some point and use Bootstrap, Bootswatch, and Font Awesome to have a better looking site (more tools I discovered in all my reading), but for now, I'm using BootstrapCDN to overcome the need to make a stylesheet or further/better learn JS. I'm using the text editor Atom, and I like it a lot. Sometime in 2019, I did an update on Atom and came across a staging area and the ability to issue your Git commits from the Editor, (maybe this was always a thing?) but I don't avoid it altogether as I don't desire to lose those skills after many months of building them.



I did get a new laptop in the last few months, and so I generated a new, distinct SSH key for that one. For some reason, I could not successfully clone the remote repository via the command line. I kept getting this error:



I also had to install Atom on the new machine, so I attempted to clone the remote repository via Atom's Git package, and that worked just fine. (I had read that thins might be due to a config thing in the SSH files, but I didn't take the time to explore that once I could access the current files.)

 

BIGGEST STRUGGLES THIS WEEK

MOST HELPFUL THIS WEEK

NEED TO IMPROVE