Posts of Sam Whitfield RSSMon, 24 Jul 2023 06:42:59 GMTI spent 35 years as an engineer, most of them at a drawing board and later with whatever software the company trained us on. When I retired I assumed my days of learning new tools were behind me. Then I started volunteering at our food bank in Manchester and was handed the van rota: a whiteboard, a biro on a string and a great many crossed-out names.Emily suggested we move the rota online. I was sceptical. I'd seen enough "this will make everything easier" projects at work to know most of them make one thing easier and three things harder.The learning curveIt was gentler than I expected. Setting up a private group for the drivers took an afternoon. Learning to post each week's runs as an event with a sign-up for every slot took a week, my grandson's patience and two phone calls I'd rather not repeat.What actually changedDrivers swap shifts with each other in the group instead of ringing me at 7am.New volunteers can see who has driven which route and ask them directly.I post a photo of the loaded van every Saturday, and the thank-you comments keep people turning up.We haven't missed a collection since March. The whiteboard is still on the wall, mind. Some habits are load-bearing.If you're an older volunteer being nudged towards "the online thing", my advice is to ask for one task, learn that properly, and ignore the rest until you need it. And if you're the one doing the nudging, be patient with us. We got there with drawing boards, we'll get there with this too. :)

]]>Mon, 24 Jul 2023 06:42:59 GMTThe photo at the top shows a wartime propeller plane flying wing to wing with a modern jet. That is roughly how I feel at the volunteer coding evenings, where I am usually the oldest person in the room by about thirty years. I spent my working life as an engineer, wrote a fair bit of code along the way (including some PHP back when websites had visitor counters), and retired thinking I was done with it. Then the food bank needed a better volunteer rota, and here we are.What surprised me is how approachable both tools are. A few notes for anyone, of any age, thinking of giving it a go.PHP: old, and none the worse for itEasy to start: the syntax is plain and you can see results in a browser the same afternoon. I had a working sign-up form before my tea went cold. Well, nearly.Plenty to read: PHP has been around long enough that almost every question already has a tutorial, a forum thread or a page in the manual.A big community: whenever I got stuck, someone had been stuck in exactly the same place and written down how they got out.React: new to me, and kinder than expectedComponents: building a screen from small reusable pieces suits an engineer's brain. It is modular design with a new name.Shared work: people publish ready-made components, so you rarely start from nothing.It's JavaScript: one of the most widely used languages around, so help is everywhere, including from my grandson.Good documentation: clear enough for a beginner and deep enough for the young ones who already know everything.Put the two together with MySQL for the data, Next.js for the web and React Native for phones, and you have a stack that welcomes beginners without boring the experts. If an old engineer can get a rota working, so can you :)

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