Googles Coder tool turns Raspberry Pi into a mini web server | ZDNet

English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at Tr...
English: Extract from Raspberry Pi board at TransferSummit 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google has released Coder, a free open source tool to make it easier to use Raspberry Pi mini-computers to build for the web.

Hatched by Google Creative Lab creative technologist Jason Striegel, designer Jeff Baxter, and a small team in New York, Coder offers a stepping stone for people interested in building for the web by converting cheap Raspberry Pi mini-computers into personal web servers through a stripped-back web-based development environment.

Google’s pitching Coder at an education audience, a potential sweet spot for Raspberry Pi given its $35 price tag and one Google has focused on previously, gifting 15,000 of the devices to UK schools earlier this year. Raspberry Pi supporters in the UK have also been urging schools to use the devices to spur interest in coding, hacking and building.

via Googles Coder tool turns Raspberry Pi into a mini web server | ZDNet.

Forget Coding: Writing Is Design’s “Unicorn Skill”

English: Iconic image of graphic design.
English: Iconic image of graphic design. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Students need to know more than basic coding skills.

These days many designers can code–an increasingly important skill for landing a job. But few are just as fluent in their own language as they are in Javascript. That presents a serious problem in terms of design. Users still depend on copy to interact with apps and other products. If designers don’t know how to write well, the final product–be it a physical or digital one–can suffer as a result.

In his “2017 Design in Tech Report,” John Maeda writes that “code is not the only unicorn skill.” According to Maeda, who is the head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic and former VP of design at VC firm Kleiner Perkins, words can be just as powerful as the graphics in which designers normally traffic. “A lot of times designers don’t know that words are important,” he said while presenting the report at SXSW this weekend. “I know a few designers like that–do you know these designers out there? You do know them, right?”

From FastCompany

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