The video below from two years ago talks about how this company got me so passionate about technology and I’ve enjoyed every moment of it, even the hard times.
Over the past five years, not only have I been developing the .Net backend infrastructure that is now the business’s core lead generation platform but I found time to also compete in extreme charitable events such as completing two Ironman events and also founded a .Net Usergroup right here in Liverpool!
None of which could I have achieved without the true leadership and support from TLA. I just want to say a big thank you to everyone who played a part in this journey and helped me be the developer and person I am today.
I wish TLA all the best as they embark on the next phase of enhancing their platform and I hope our paths cross again one day. But as one door closes, others open and I am extremely excited for what is to come in my next future role.
For my next role, I would like to gain more front-end exposure to help me transition to a more full-stack role ideally picking up more knowledge around Typescript and React or similar technologies.
I’m very entrepreneurial and have loved being innovative in my role helping architect out the platform at TLA. My true passion for the future is to one day start a technology company of my own so exposure to leadership and building on my current technical knowledge while helping support a company would ideally be in my best interest and serve the company I support next.
If you feel you have a position that I could potentially be a good fit for please reach out via my [email protected]
After about 8 months of training and coaching from Ian Williams under I Will Triathalon coaching, organizing hotels, car rentals, and adjusting to a new tri bike for a 3 days away trip around what will be my second full Ironman event.
This Ironman was a little different from the first, I wanted to not solely let the triathlon training and event take over my year. During the first triathlon, I cut my weight to 90kg, stopped drinking completely, and was obsessed with doing everything I could to prepare myself to the point where it controlled my lifestyle by the end of the event. Even though I finished an epic event and was ecstatic about completing my first Ironman I soon fell out of love with the sport and ended up putting on weight instantly after the event.
Fast-forward through a pandemic and depression I decided it was time to hit that red carpet one last time with TLA offering to fund the event for me. I had a different mindset coming into training by knowing I had to put in the effort but on the other side make time to wind down, spend quality time with the family, and have a drink if I really wanted (but not too much).
The Swim
My wife, good friend/boss watched as the 70.3 group of athletes descended into the water the sun rising and the music sounding out like a battle song over the beach. After watching for half over 20 minutes and sipping my bottle of precision hydration water mix I zipped up the wet suit and put on my swim cap as I made my way slowly to the start line.
I was expecting 1 hour 20 but the sea was calm and as I ran into the water quickly. Drafting behind other fellow athletes saving as much energy as I could. I felt great apart from the vaseline on the back of my neck didn’t seem to help the wet suit from rubbing so I changed my swim technique slightly to roll my body instead of moving my head and neck which helped.
The sun was glaring and even with my tinted goggles, it was hard to identify the buoys. My goggles steamed up and I ended up trusting the direction of the wave of athletes I was with and drafted even closer. At the first turn to come back on myself I stopped in a daze double checking my position and looking at the buoys to confirm my turning point. After realizing all the red caps turning here signifying the Ironman full event I shot back into the front crawl to resume my race.
After completing a 2k swim and coming back on myself I focused more on my technique making sure my fingers were closed and I was taking hold of the water. My fingers started aching as I pulled forward and pushed the water under me. I looked ahead and chased the next athlete constantly looking for the next drafting opportunity. This was for two reasons, one was to deter any marine life such as sharks and jellyfish and the second was for speed.
Coming out of the water I clocked 1 hour and 15 minutes 43 seconds with an average pace of 2 minutes per 100 meters, wow! My fastest open-water swim was more relaxed in the water and I used a lot less energy which was surprising. I used the quick-release zip and took my wet suit to waste height as I ran the 600 meters to transition with ease.
The Bike
I took my time in transition amountingto a whopping 15 minutes and 02 seconds which could have been improved, making sure I was comfortable and ready for the long ride ahead. Put on my socks, helmet, and bum bag with enough nutrition to get me around and applied a layer of sunscreen which burnt on the back of my neck due to the swimsuit rubbing. The only thing I forgot was my gloves which was a slight inconvenience later on when I noticed my hands sweating slightly holding onto the breaks descending downhill making the bars slightly slippery but nothing I was majorly concerned about.
After ascending up the red carpet out of transition I looked down as I started turning on my cycle computer and setting up the navigation. The cycle computer really helped, it didn’t just give me information on how much further I had to go or directions if I wasn’t completely sure but also helped me mentally by knowing how much of the incline I had left which is a fantastic tool to have by your side.
The roads were closed off from traffic and the bike route was easy to follow. There was hardly any wind and the weather was hot but I found these conditions perfect. I knew I had a long day, my cycle computer connected to my pedals through blue tooth to give me my average watts which were around 170-180, and occasionally hitting around 300 briefly going up some hills. It felt comfortable and a pace I could easily manage and I was happy to have kept low down in an aero position on the tri bike all the way around apart from standing upright a few times when ascending up some hills.
I stopped frequently to refill my water bottles and use the toilet both taking up a good amount of time. If time is of importance in the future I could always throw cheap water bottles away. It was good that I needed the toilet though as it showed I wasn’t dehydrated and managed to take on a lot of fluids on the bike something I’ve been practicing more since my first Ironman.
Coming to the end of the bike around 10 miles hit higher watts and pushed more to get to the finish with a lot of energy in reserve and feeling good I completed the bike in 6 Hours 49 Minutes 48 Seconds with an average pace of 26km/hr.
Racking up my bike and taking time to get comfortable again I got to my last transition bike sat down and swapped my socks, applied more sun cream, and tightened my shoes ready for the run taking 12 minutes 36 seconds in transition.
The Run
I knew what to expect, I felt great coming off the bike and the swim but knew this feeling wouldn’t last very long on the run. Even though I was feeling really strong, to the point I could probably do some star jumps, I applied a 4-minute steady run and 1-minute walk sequence to conserve my energy and walked through every aid station which was around 2 minutes every 3-4 kilometers.
My first 5k was easy, I took on fluids and started eating at the first aid station. Then it hit me, and I started feeling my energy drain. I changed my running sequence to a 3-minute steady run and 1-minute walk and knew I just had to keep moving forward. I didn’t want to overeat and cause nausea which I faced in my half-Ironman leading up to the event so I was cautious to eat accordingly and drink sips of water without gulping it down.
About 23k in was the expected darkness, fewer participants on the course, and thoughts about can I even do this. I was expecting these negative thoughts around this time which knocked me down a lot on my first Ironman but I just reminded myself that I knew I could do this and it didn’t matter about the time. In my mind, I was prepared to walk the whole way without being frustrated with myself if I really had to which gave me some positivity.
Nausea kicked in followed by stomach cramps which made me not want to take on any more nutrition but I knew I had to try so I mixed some of my precision hydration gels with some water and sipped slowly as I walked through the aid station. My energy levels dipped and spiked strangely one minute I could run for 5 minutes straight and others I could barely hold 1 minute.
Keeping some structure I tried to motivate every move forward clocking and giving myself small goals to achieve. Common Josh, I said, let’s move for 1 minute and then rest for 1 minute as I hit rock bottom.
The final lap out of three boosted me knowing I was nearly there. I hope to improve this discipline in my future races as clearly this was my worst discipline performance but I had the strength to get around which I have to be proud of in a total of 5 hours 48 minutes 28 seconds averaging 8.16 min/km.
The finish line
What a day, 14 hours 21 minutes35 Seconds later and I get to that red carpet and even took the time to appreciate it and slow down. My wife and boss were already waiting at the finish line to congratulate me.
There was another couple of kilometers afterward as I collect the bike from the transition and walked to the Uber pickup point which was further out due to the road closures.
When writing this blog post, the Power BI REST API version was v1.0 and the Power BI connector for the logic app was still an in preview feature. This post is intended to help overcome some of the blockers you might hit when following the Microsoft documentation as it didn’t really advise on how to overcome some of the issues I faced, possibly because the technology is still so new and in preview
Requirements
Microsoft Azure AD and admin access (register app and create security group)
Microsoft Power BI Pro Account (you can get a 30day free trial)
Postman (To easily perform REST requests to the API)
1.Setup App And Security Group (Azure AD)
As a starting point, I recommend reading over the Power BI Automation Documentation from Microsoft and start with the first step of registering an app and creating a security group. There are multiple ways of doing this from the registration tool, Azure CLI, or manually in the portal.
After you create the App you can create a secret and copy the application ID found on the overview page of the app we just registered.
You should grant the app API permissions to the Power BI service using delegated permissions
After you finished creating the app, go over to the Azure AD and create a new security group and then add the app/service principle we created as a member of that security group.
2. Get an authentication access token
To get an authentication token, the documentation goes through an example using a .Net Console application. In my example below, I’m going to call off to the login.microsoftonline.com endpoint with a POST request with postman to acquire my access token
you can get the tenant id and all the other information from the app you registered in section 1
Hint If you change permissions on the app you registered in Azure in section 1 then you will need to acquire a new authentication token before the updated permissions take effect
3. Enable Power BI API Access
One setting the Microsoft documentation doesn’t tell you about is you need to enable the Power BI API settings inside the Admin Portal section of Power BI (you will need admin access to do this). Enabling this feature will take 15 minutes to take effect.
403 – “API is not accessible for application If you see this error it either means you’re targetting the organisation workspace, “My Workspace” or you haven’t given your app the required permissions in Azure AD.
3. Create Dataset Using Power BI Rest API
The dataset needs to be created by the registered app or if you decide to skip this step and create the dataset manually then you need to make sure you set the owner of the dataset to be the app otherwise we can’t access it or view it later using the logic app
Warning Microsoft documentation suggests creating a new dataset on the organisation level endpoint https://api.PowerBI.com/v1.0/myorg/datasets but I would avoid this as you will probably run into permission issues and be given a 401 response code.
I recommend you create the dataset in a new workspace and use the group URL instead. The group_id is the dataset id, you can get this off the query string in the Power BI portal online https://api.PowerBI.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{group_id}/datasets
The screenshot above shows a rest request we publish to Power BI’s rest API to create our dataset. You will need to use the Auth Token provided in section 2. You should get a 201 response code back meaning that the dataset was successfully created.
3. Push data into the dataset using a Logic App (In Preview)
In my logic app, I’m reading messages from a service bus queue and then looping through each result. IF a field within the message has been assigned, in my case the failure message then I am sending this to the Power BI dataset using the connector.
Select the “Add rows to a dataset” action for Power BI.
You should be able to see a drop down for each of the required options. Select the workspace of the dataset you want to populate with the data and also the dataset and table name. You can also use the Dataset ID if you want to populate it manually instead of using the drop down.
HINT If the Dataset doesn’t appear make sure that the app is the owner of the dataset in Power BI and all permissions have been enabled on the service principle
Conclusion
Once the logic app runs your dataset will instantly have access to the imported data! If you create a report on top of the dataset you can see the data we imported using this logic app connector and the Power BI Rest API
Benefits
one of the benefits of this approach is the logic app connectors, using a Logic App I can pull data from any data source such as Application Insights, Elastic Search, SQL Database, Redis.. the list goes on.. and easily push it into a dataset that our reporting team can have access to.
We didn’t need to create any databases to hold the data so this saved time and hosting costs, although I’m not sure how much Power BI cost for ingesting the dataset.
Easily create any shape of dataset using a simple Rest request and populate the data from multiple data sources using logic app is extremely powerful
You don’t need to create a scheduled refresh task like you would if you was querying a SQL database. You can simply refresh your reports because the dataset gets updated instantly
Cons
One thing to be aware of is the Power BI Rest API has a rate limit of 100 requests every 60 seconds so it’s worth bulk inserting data if you plan on inserting large amounts.
To get started, just enable the notify me skill in your Alexa App, giving it permission to send notifications to your Alexa and linking it to your Amazon account. Next, just say, “Alexa, open Notify Me” and the skill will introduce itself and send your access code via email.
You can use our contact form to send us your unique access code and we will set up your notifications against your registered account. If you unregister for email alerts, you will also unregister for any Alexa Notifications.
Please visit www.notifymyecho.com for official instructions on how to obtain your unique access code!
Father Christmas comes every year but even his magic has been stretched recently when it comes to putting your favourite game consoles under that tree. Although our children have been well behaved this year and despite Santa’s little Elves, having an incredible hard work ethic the production line for our latest game consoles such as the Play Station 5 and Xbox Series X is becoming a slim hope for some families. A new game console was on a lot of child’s wish list this Christmas and we understand the pressure of families searching for one. Even though we can’t guarantee you stock of these devices, three developers Danielle Smith, Shannon Miller and Joshua Duxbury have set out to program a bot to crawl the web to find you available stock!
After speaking to many family and friends, it became apparent that they were constantly picking up their phones to check if a console was available yet. We found this gap in the market and couldn’t believe Amazon and other retails didn’t offer any live notifications. But we saw where our expertise could help. Being equipped with the skills to program in multiple languages, we got together to produce a very efficient bot that crawls the web to find available stock and notifies a mailing list when it becomes available.
We are working hard to create a form to capture your contact details to notify you in real time of available stock. Think of us as your elves from the north pole – working just for you.
The form we are creating will target an Amazon item using a ASIN code and then we will match that product with similar products on a range of trusted retailers such as smyths toys, Argos, AO etc…
when you enter the valid ASIN code then a image of the product will be displayed for visibility and you will be able to complete the form for email notifications. In the future, we are also looking to provide free text notifications.
while we develop out our service, If you’d like to subscribe to our stock alert for free you can sign up using our current form below
So, we have come into the year 2020 with some big expectations and goals. Saying ‘I do’ to the one we love in front of all our family and friends, partying the night away and finally going on that dream honeymoon. Then it hits. COVID-19. Something that didn’t even cross our minds! Government restrictions mean that we have to put these events on the back burner or sacrifice some of the privileges… privileges like having more than 30 people attend!
I know, it’s hard but I’m positive that everyone who has had their event postponed this year will have an even better event in the future! And just to help you wedding planners out there, we have released a skill to the Alexa Skill Store to give your wedding a personal touch and much laughter. This skill provides your guests with their seating arrangements, plays music and provide a custom experience programmed by you! Not only can this reduce crowding by directing guests faster to their table but it can also be a fun, automated, contact-free experience for your guests to stay safe. Yay!
All you will need is one of the Amazon Alexa Devices and an internet connection (No WIFI? Hotspot to your phone – that’s what I did at my wedding!). There are various devices you can purchase from the cheaper Alexa Dot, Alexa Echo or even the Alexa Show ranging from as little as £29.99 to £100 depending on your choice.
Once you have your Alexa Device you can visit the Alexa Skill store to enable and install the skill on your device
You can then use the awake word followed by the skills invocation name to start interacting with the skill for example “Alexa, Find my table”. We haven’t set anything up yet though, so she will respond with a message saying that we need to visit the configuration page to set up our skill and customize the responses for each of our guests. Click Here to navigate to the skill configurator page. It’s designed to be simple to setup.
It’s quite easy to get started, we don’t need to register a new account on the configuration page, we can simply sign in with our Amazon account which will link the configuration we set up with the Alexa Skill.
We are presented by three tabs used to configure our skill and give it that personalised touch. The first section is the intro page. When we first invoke the skill an intro message will be announced to welcome guests using this skill.
You can customise this as you see fit for any occasion birthdays, weddings or even meetings but seeing as we are focusing on weddings in this blog post I will write “Welcome to the Duxbury wedding”.
On the next tab, we assume you are going to have somewhere to seat your guests. In this example, we have used table names but you could keep it simple and use numbers if you prefer. It completely depends oh your table setup but these controls give us the flexibility to customise it how we see fit. As you can see I’ve named my table based on the Disney theme and I’ve called my first table “Aladdin and Jasmine”. In the Audio Reference field, I’ve added a link to an audio file that is hosted on my personal website it’s an MP3 audio file of a short soundtrack from the Disney film Aladdin called a whole new world.
We can complete the setup and associate our guests with the tables we just created. I’ve added three guests to my example
Now if we go back to our Alexa device we can invoke the skill again by saying “Alexa, Find my table” but this time she will respond with the configured responses we set up in the portal.
Example, welcome to the duxbury wedding
Example, found a table for Victoria
Okay can I get any extras? You have fallen in love with our skill, who wouldn’t? You have just made some funny personal messages for your guests attending your wedding. Hey, you even got that music to play for your friends who just love some 80’s music! But you don’t like the look of having an Alexa device ruining your entrance looking all basic. Well next we can look at customising the style of your Alexa Device for under £19.99 we can select from some premade designs or even make our own!
We hope this skill brings to your wedding some organsiation getting people to their seats, good laughter in those personal messages you setup and great memories when you recall you tried out something new at your wedding.
Click here and follow us on our Facebook Page for updates as we continue to add more features you will love and enjoy and don’t forget to tag us in your videos, comments and reviews!
All the best,
The Alexa Wedding Planner Team
The blockchain, known for the architecture behind the creation of Bitcoin and seen by most as the next big bang in technology since the invention of the internet. But what is the blockchain you might be asking? I’m hoping by the end of this blog post you will have a great understanding of exactly what the Blockchain is and why it might be useful to your organisation along with how you might create your first successful blockchain.
What is the Blockchain?
The Blockchain is described as a shared, distributed ledger. The blockchain within one organisation is useless. Only when multiple organisations use the power of the blockchain to create a decentralised ledger, can the true potential of the blockchain technology start to be seen.
Shared – The more organizations or companies that participate in the blockchain the more valuable the Blockchain becomes. Data becomes vastly visible, accessible and immutable.
Distributed – There are many replicas of the blockchain database. The more replicas there are, the more authentic it becomes.
Ledger – The database is a read/write only database. Therefore, it is an immutable audit trail of every transaction that has happened.
Blockchain truly is a mechanism to bring everyone to the highest degree of accountability. No more missed transactions, human or machine errors. Even an exchange that was not done with the consent of the parties involved. – Ian Khan
The above quote by Ian Khan gives a good description of Blockchain technology. I see a technology that allows us to create transactions that are impervious to fraud and establishes a shared truth.
No one owns the blockchain and therefore the responsibility of the blockchain is shared between all organisations using the network. This is beneficial so let’s take Facebook as a good example: I upload a picture to Facebook and tell Facebook which friends should be able to see it and I expect Facebook to do roughly what I think it will do. Ultimately though, and ignoring some legal and ethical aspects, Facebook controls my data and can unilaterally evolve it (add to it, delete it, modify it) and I am unable to do anything about it. Of course, I feel that I have control, but ultimately it is still Facebook who owns and controls my data. On a Blockchain, this data cannot be manipulated by any one individual depending on the rules that govern the Blockchain.
Distributed ledgers are governed and controlled by rules
A distributed ledger has a set of rules that specify what new information is considered valid or not, and how participants should react to it. This set of rules could be thought of as a constitution.
Sometimes called the blockchain rules, network rules, or the rules of the ledger, these are pre-agreed technical rules about how new data is handled. Participants are subject to this constitution of rules when they create or join a distributed ledger network.
For example in bitcoin, one rule is the limit to the amount of data in one block of transactions. Another is the rule to submit a hash with a specific pattern, in order to create a valid block. A third is you can’t spend a bitcoin that you don’t have.
In a private distributed ledger network, one rule could be that no transaction is valid unless a minimum of three participants approves it with their digital signatures; or for certain assets to be signed every transaction. A participant in a private network may also have legal contractual commitments to the other participants, such as service-level agreements.
The key point is that the evolution of data in a distributed ledger network is that at a technical level; there are rules about how data is handled. Before distributed ledgers, single entities had total control over their data and commitments were made only at the legal contractual / terms-of-service level.
Are there any disadvantages of the Blockchain?
In Marley Gray’s presentation, found in the recommended content of this blog, he outlined that Bitcoin only computes 7 transactions a second. This demonstrates the computing power needed to operate a blockchain ledger. It is extremely slow in comparison to other databases out there for obvious reasons. As an example, just a single bitcoin transaction has been calculated to devour as much energy as what powers 1.57 US households for a day – roughly 5,000 times more energy-hungry than a typical credit card payment. Would you prefer to pay by cash, credit or planet-wide blackout?
Data within the Blockchain has to be deterministic. A block on the chain is propagated between nodes to verify its authenticity. If we have values that aren’t deterministic, then while this block propagates between thousands of nodes the value could change causing the chain to see the new block as fraudulent and prevent it from entering the chain.
Blockchain technology is expensive. I created a private blockchain on Azure and because of the infrastructure required it spun up five virtual machines which totalled £100 per month. This was only for a trial and if we wanted to do this on an industrial level you would incur a much bigger cost. On the public Blockchain, Bitcoin miners are picking up blocks (transactions) within 10 minutes for $0.44 a block. Cost can be reduced or increased based on the cost you assign to the block. If you don’t mind the transaction speed, you can place a lower transaction cost on the block or alternatively a higher cost.
What are the avantages?
We can have a peer to peer exchange to dramatically reduce settlement time. For example, imagine we are developers for cancer research and we are sending medical advice to a testing company. On the blockchain, we would have a live update on the progress of how the medical advice affects the patient. We don’t have to call around or attempt to obtain information because we are both sharing the same ledger. Data becomes instantly available to both parties allows us to build faster data analytics and we can all instantly become more responsive.
Allows separate organisations to share a standard organised ledger. This allows for decentralization and promotes shared control which encourages data sharing:
• (1) Leads to more data, and therefore better models.
• (2) Allows for shared control of AI training data & models.
Competitors (say, banks or music labels) traditionally would never share their data. But it would be straightforward to show how, with combined data from several banks, one could make better models for credit card fraud prevention.
Who uses Blockchain?
There are a lot of companies that use the blockchain but to pull out and observe one we can look at supermarkets. Little known to the public, Walmart supermarket has implemented the blockchain chain technology to track and manage the process of food distribution. The corporate giants have improved efficiency and trust involved in the process of tracking the meat and poultry that they sell. The blockchain technology tracks information (through QR code scanning) at all steps of the process from the farmer, to the broker, distributor, retailer and everything in between.
The initiative for this was down to a Salmonella outbreak within the supply chain which took months to correct due to complicated documenting and IT that they were using. With the Blockchain, all of this data could be retrieved in seconds with AI technology.
Centralised vs. decentralised?
Even if some organizations decide to share, they could share without needing blockchain technology. For example, they could simply pool it into an S3 instance and expose the API among themselves. But in some cases, decentralisation gives new benefits. First is the literal sharing of infrastructure, so that one organisation in the sharing consortium doesn’t control all the “shared data” by themselves. (This was a key stumbling block a few years back when the music labels tried to work together for a common registry). Another benefit is that it’s easier to turn the data & models into assets, which can then be licensed externally for profit. I elaborate on this below. (Thanks to Adam Drake for drawing extra-attention to the hoard-vs-share tension).
CRUD vs CRAB
CRUD stands for Create-Read-Update-Delete. These are the basic operations of persistent storage. These actions don’t apply to the blockchain as you can’t delete or update transactions. Instead, operations on blockchain can be described as CRAB: Create-Retrieve-Append-Burn. The create and Retrieve relate to CRUD which is pretty self-explanatory. Append is appending to the transaction. Burn refers to assigning a completely random public key to the block and therefore rendering all operations as unauthorised to everyone (essentially like forgetting your key).
Bring me onto GDPR
An important aspect of GDPR on Blockchain is the fact that personal data is not to leave the EU. This is a major problem with public Blockchains, since there is no control on who hosts a node. This is less an issue when it comes to private or permissioned blockchains.
There is also a separate section — Art. 17 — on ‘Right to be Forgotten’. This concept is clearly an important one regarding ‘erasure of data’. However, not anywhere in the document, not even in the definitions part — Art. 4 — is there any explanation of what the term erasure of data actually means.
The GDPR initiative probably had only CRUD in mind (“you are always able to Delete information”) when dealing with basic operations on persistent storage. The fact that this doesn’t match with blockchain technology creates some friction. Now, because there is no definition in GDPR of “erasure of data” at this point, you probably need to interpret this as strict, which means that throwing away your encryption keys which encrypts personal data in a blockchain technology is not acceptable as ‘erasure of data’ according to GDPR.
The Workaround
Of course, this has consequences on what we can store on a blockchain. Storing personal data on a blockchain is not an option anymore according to GDPR. A popular option to get around this problem is a very simple one: You store the personal data off-chain and store the reference to this data, along with a hash of this data and other metadata (like claims and permissions about this data), on the blockchain.
How does Blockchain ledger compare to relational databases?
The Blockchain is not controlled by any single entity.
The Blockchain has no single point of failure.
Experts of science have developed a great understanding of the brain and through scientific study have determined that the brain is a goal-seeking organism. Whatever goal you give your subconscious mind, it will work night and day to achieve it.
Throughout our lives, some goals might take longer than others and some might just not be possible to achieve in the near future due to funds, health or whatever reasons that may be. This is why it is very important to have multiple goals in your life. Why? You might ask. Well, because the more goals we give ourselves, the more we are enabled to gain a higher percentage rate of completed goals by the end of our lives.
We are humans, and by being so, we automatically have a strong will to succeed creating the rush we feel every time we check off those goals will inspire you to want to accomplish even more. For every goal you accomplish, your mind and body are going to crave stronger challenges.
So with that being said I would like to share my current goals which I started in 2017:
Travel
I will travel to the following places:
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Dubai
Japan
Rome, Italy
Paris, France
America
New Zealand
India
Bali
Tahiti
Nepal
Tibet
Turkey
Africa
Israel
Russia
Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia
Vacation on a Greek Island
I will visit and see the following sights:
Disneyworld
Epcott Center
The Eiffel Tower
The Vatican
The Great Wall of China
The Taj Mahal
The Great Pyramids
Machu Pichu
Climb on a Glacier in Alaska
Go on a safari in Africa
Become a certified scuba diver
Snorkel in Hawaii
Learn to sail
Skydive
Ride in a hot air balloon
Go on a river-rafting trip
Go kayaking
Attend Thai boxing camp in Thailand
Fly in a glider
Dive in a submarine
Learn to windsurf
Learn to ski
Ski black diamond level
Ski in Europe
Explore all 5 of Hawaii’s islands
Swim with the dolphins
Go horse riding
Go to the Olympics
Take one of my future children to the Olympics
Do the Three Peaks
Attempt climbing Mount Everest
Personal Achievements:
Appear on TV and attempt acting
Make one million pounds
Run a 10k race
Run 14 miles in less than 3 hours
Build or buy my dream house
Own a vacation home in Hawaii
Get A University Masters Degree
Get A PhD Degree
Produce a YouTube tutorial on programming
Write a children’s educational game
Produce a large open source programme
See my future children graduate College/University
Learn to speak another language fluently
Master 5 magic tricks
Learn to sing and play 10 popular songs on the Guitar
Win over a £100 in a casino
Give a talk to an audience of over 100 people
Learn how to take world-class photographs
Type 50 words a minute
Weigh 82 Kilogrammes (13 stone)
Bench press 200 pounds
Run a mile under 6 minutes
Do a fire walk
Complete Iron man Triathalon
Take more guitar lessons
Take more piano lessons
Take more pilot/flying lessons
Have an incredible 50th birthday party
Achieve something spectacular as part of a team
Live to be 100+ years old
Visit the Achawara tribe and work with a shaman in the rain forest
Read The Soul of Money by Lynn Twist
Develop leadership skills
So if you’re like me, you love going to the classes available at your local Gym. Problem is, most people wait up till midnight in order to secure their precious class for the following week. Below you can see a Http request which I was able to book me into my Virtual RPM class!
The Http request has booked a class
This can then be turned into a command line application and scheduled each week.
Amazing time here, free Pizza, food and shelter.. What else do keen programmers need to get enthusiastic about hacking some code? People travel from all over the world to attend these events so I couldn’t not put an application in to become a Mentor at this event.
Personally, I can’t recommend these events enough, the Hackathons are very well run and put together to embrace a creative environment. If you are at university thinking about attending your first student hack or coming to share your knowledge as a mentor you are guaranteed to be impressed with the exceptional minds that end up hacking together.
From the 10th – 12th of March in 2017 I got to experience my first Hackathon as a Mentor.
Here is a short list of some of the projects the students who attended where hacking.
Leap Motion Gaming
The Google leap motion is super fun to play around with, one of the students used the sensor capability in a game. The sensor projected the users hand in the game and enabled you to pick up virtual objects. You had to use these objects to deflect on coming projectiles coming towards you.
Message Mug
This is a mug which you could send a message or picture to via an API. It was powered by the heat of the coffee in the mug and a programmer at the Hackathon programmed it to get the latest BBC news headline when a coffee or hot water was poured into it.
Mars Rover
A little robot shaped like the mars rover, having four wheels and programmable. The robot was programmed to move around the room to specific coordinates programmed beforehand simulating some of the features the Mars Rover would be using while exploring Mars.
Hand Controlled Hover Craft (Drones)
Controlling the movement and altitude of a drone using nothing but leap motion.