Paraíso

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso
Bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

"Poema de los Dones" / "Poem of the Gifts"

Perspectiva

Otoño de 2019

Volunteering: some lessons learned

As many of you know, I started my own programming club for children about two years ago. This weekend we had our 40th session (!) and I thought it is a good moment to look back and share some of the things I have learned. First and foremost, volunteering my time has been a hugely rewarding experience and has allowed me to meet a bunch of wonderful people who have helped all along. So without further ado, my short list of lessons.

1. Setting up a CoderDojo is easier than you think. The resources are already there, the community is great and it doesn't have to be perfect to be good. Are you are thinking about volunteering your time? Stop thinking, start acting!
2. Small is good, so no need to scale up. One person can comfortably deal with 10 to 15 children plus the parents. This is not a start up! Having said that, help from other mentors have been much appreciated.
3. All free means no money transactions, i.e. I get to spend time where it matters. The only down side is that some people will sign for a session and then not show up.
4. Surprisingly high turnover. I did underestimate how difficult it is to retain children, especially teenagers. I run the club on Saturday afternoons and children have busy agendas on weekends!
5. Having a few spare old laptops available is great as it makes the CoderDojo truly open to anyone, no matter whether they can afford a laptop or not. So big thank you to the CoderDojo @ HPI for the laptops, to RRD for the old power units and mice and, last but not least, to my brother for collecting and sending me old laptop hard disks.
6. Parents are heavily biased. This means very few girls are encouraged to code. Not good. But not giving up on this though.
7. It turns out you don't need to be an expert programmer to get children started. When I was in Cranfield I ran a Fortran course for university students and learned that (mostly) you just need to be one step ahead.
8. Most excuses you can think of for not doing something are actually not valid. Children don't seem to care much about my accent when I speak German.
9. Finally, don´t fight the good weather, between an afternoon coding and a Summer day outside the choice is clear.

This post was first published as a LinkedIn article

My latest article in LinkedIn

Erasmus 2017

Sometimes all you need is the right dataset, a great template and some spare time to fight tables provided in pdf files...

For this visualization, I got to know about the dataset through a tweet from Pedro Duque.

https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/639199/

Españoles en Alemania - historia en movimiento

Data taken from Destatis
Visualisation uses a template from Flourish Studio
You can also see it here

Valencia is just one flight away...

Wallpaper

Ágora

Valencia (ii)

Palau de les Arts

Valencia

#AlcaláMágica (ii)

#AlcaláMágica

May 4th

El cielo azul

Discovering (relatively) new buildings in Berlin

Mr Borella

Love Dreams

Ice Dreams

The store manager of this ice cream shop was incredibly friendly and finally even invited us to ice cream!

Sun Dreams

Fame Dreams

Another photowalk with colleagues, another bunch of nice photos. I need to do this more often.