This is the text of the keynote speech I delivered at the 2018 Concordia Library Research Forum. It has been edited slightly. Thank you for this lovely opportunity to be among you this morning. I feel especially honoured to deliver this keynote because I believe librarians and journalists share a special kinship because our jobs […]
On the ethics of web scraping
Scraping data from websites is a valuable skill for a journalist, and often (as was my case), the first incentive to learn to code. But once you acquire the power to harvest mass amount of data in a short time, ethical questions invariably pop up: Can I take this data? Can I republish this […]
How to survive the desert of despair in your code-learning journey
A lot of ink has been devoted lately on reality checks for new self-taught coders. Here are two prominent posts: TechCrunch: Don’t Believe Anyone Who Tells You Learning To Code Is Easy Viking Code School Blog: Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard These posts are reactions to the wealth of beginner courses on coding, some which promise […]