I reckon that I’ve learnt enough to build my app. But then something extraordinary happens. I look at my blank code editor and my head empties. I look longer and – by some strange quantum effect, I assume – my head seems to empty further. With the training wheels off, I suddenly feel that I know nothing and am panicked by the sensation. FreeCodeCamp’s Larson chuckles when I tell him about this phenomenon.

“The thing that gets lost,” he says, “and which I think is important to know, is that programming is never easy. You’re never doing the same thing twice, because code is infinitely reproducible and if you’ve already solved a problem and you encounter it again, you just use your old solution. So by definition you’re kind of always on this frontier where you’re out of your depth. And one of the things you have to learn is to accept that feeling – of being constantly wrong.”

Which makes coding sound like a branch of Zen Buddhism.

From Code to Joy by Andrew Smith, 1843 Magazine, June/July 2018.

According to Craig Mod, writing on the New Yorker’s Elements blog, all we really need is a “networked lens”.

Makes me want to shout “Up in the sky, look! It’s a camera. It’s a phone. It’s Supercam!”.

While waiting 15 minutes (!) at the peak of rush-hour for a train one day this week, I had time to capture this view of the sky, including a few of the aircraft in it. London is served by five airports (Heathrow, Gatwick, Luton, Stansted and London City), and during the day at least, the sky is always full of aircraft. By holding my iPhone up to the sky, the Plane Finder AR app shows me each flight’s details in real-time. Incredible.

Google Maps is a dynamic mapping application brought to you by the clever people at … Google. It’s dynamic because you can reposition the map “on the fly” (ie without having to reload your browser), so it’s much quicker than most of the other mapping applications available on the web.

Google has encouraged people to develop their own applications for its maps, and one of the best that I’ve come across in recent weeks is OnOneMap. It describes itself as “the UK’s first property search engine map”, and I can see how it might become an essential resource for anyone hoping to buy property in the UK.

The idea is simple, but new: people and agents with houses to sell inform OnOneMap of the details and OnOneMap displays their properties on Google’s maps. You can filter the properties by many different criteria, not the least of which is price, and then view all the available properties that match your requirements in the neighbourhood of your choice.

Prior to OnOneMap the only way to obtain as comprehensive a list of available properties in a single neighbourhood was to drive around the area looking for “For Sale” signs while compiling your own list with pencil and paper! (Well OK, maybe a pen.) So if good property really is a case of “location, location, location”, OnOneMap should do very well.

A couple of weeks ago, I read the following sentence in the Economist (see Telecoms and the internet: The meaning of free speech):

The acquisition by eBay of Skype is a helpful reminder to the world’s trillion-dollar telecoms industry that all phone calls will eventually be free.

Free calls struck me as too good to be true, but then last week I discovered that BT has decided to compete directly with Skype by under-cutting its prices significantly until the end of the year. You have to use BT’s VOIP software, known as BT Communicator, but then calls to North America are only 0.5p per minute. Last month calls to Australia were completely free. Perhaps the Economist’s prediction is correct.

In recent weeks I’ve been captivated by Google Earth.

If you don’t know it, the BBC television programme Click Online has a good description of this spectacular mapping software at Portal race goes local and global.