The Little Computer That Could
I ordered a Raspberry Pi 3 starter kit last night from Amazon – it arrived in the office at lunchtime today. While I would love to get it out of the box and immediately start playing with it, I'm not going to. I'm going to get our kids to put it together.
For a while I've suspected that our middle girl would make a great software developer. She has the right mindset – she's logical, and has a great memory. The only worry is that she's untidy, but I've known a lot of incredibly untidy developers in my time. Being “smart” doesn't really come into software development – not in the classical sense anyway. As long as you can think laterally to solve problems, you'll do fine – and she's a master at thinking laterally – especially when trying to avoid the blame for anything.
We have a couple of books at home with projects to do on the Raspberry Pi – making simple games, and so on – so I'll probably just help them make the projects to begin with. If they get interested in programming, obviously I can continue on from there – I half suspect I'll be left with an unused gadget after a few weeks though.
I have a plan though.
If the kids don't use the Pi much, I'm going to try using it as a desktop computer replacement. Pretty much everything I do on the internet these days is based in the browser, so it would be interesting to see if the new Pi is fast enough to do that (I suspect it would be fine). If it does work out, it will almost certainly mean the end of the G3 Mac sat on the corner of the desk at home.