What will you invent? - 123dev #58

Posted on February 9, 2022  •  3 minutes  • 510 words

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Ideas

In 1920, 14 year old Philo Farnsworth was plowing a potato field in Idaho. The teenager had moved there a couple years earlier with his family to a relatives farm. This farm was different though. This farm had electricity.

In 1920 electricity was only in 50% of homes and this farm boy picked it up quickly. He found old electronics magazines in the attic and started tinkering with anything he could find. Electronics came naturally to him and soon enough he was thinking of new things to build.

One day while plowing the potato field he realized that the straight lines back and forth through the field could be viewed from far away to look like a single image. Each line holding a horizontal fraction of the total image.

He connected this idea with electrons and pictures. Just like how he could slowly plow an image into a field maybe he could transmit an image one line at a time and recreate it somewhere else.

Nearly 10 years later, he held a patient for the first non-mechanical television using a horizontal image scanning technique and was well on his way to revolutionizing media and houses around the world.

Invention

The gif shows different transmission speeds for a modem and you can look at that and think that someone had to invent each one. The ability to transmit 56k data existed when 300 bps modem was invented but discovery is a linear process.

All of the resources to create the television, the internet, rockets, and any other “modern” technology has existed for thousands of years, but humans have to incrementally discover and advance towards “new” technologies.

Sometimes I think everything has already been invented, but I know that’s not true. Because what is possible changes with every new discovery.

Links

Feedback is an important part of any career. As a developer you often need to give and receive feedback about code but giving personal or behavioral feedback is much harder.

Wes has a great thread with advice for how you can get better at giving personal feedback.

[tweet https://twitter.com/wes _kao/status/1489992239283683334]

The game that has taken the world by storm. Now a bash script.

Wordle in less than 50 lines of Bash · GitHub — gist.github.com Wordle in less than 50 lines of Bash. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

I learn more coding techniques from reading working examples than from theoretical explanations. Being able to compare examples in different languages is a great way to understand core differences between languages.

This repository has almost 100 different games written in different languages so you can learn from each one.

GitHub - coding-horror/basic-computer-games: An updated version of the classic “Basic Computer Games” book, with well-written examples in a variety of common programming languages — github.com An updated version of the classic “Basic Computer Games” book, with well-written examples in a variety of common programming languages - GitHub - coding-horror/basic-computer-games: An updated version of the classic “Basic Computer Games” book, with well-written examples in a variety of common programming languages