British Red Cross | Various platform engineering and service delivery roles | ONSITE at various UK locations (London, Paisley, Manchester) or REMOTE UK, requires UK RTW and Residency (non-negotiable even if you’re remote) | Full-time | https://careers.redcross.org.uk/
Since 1870, the British Red Cross has been helping people in crisis, whoever and wherever they are, as part of the world’s largest humanitarian network. We're looking for technologists who want to use their skills to help people in crisis. We currently have 4 roles live with several more to come in the coming months
-Operations Engineers
-Software Engineers
-Service Designers
-Front End Engineers
-Delivery and Engineering Managers
Some of our benefits:
-True Flexible working (flexi hours / days / compression / location)
-36 days annual leave plus the chance to purchase 5 extra days leave
-Maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental and careers leave
-Pension scheme
I think I tend to agree here. I've taught a few terms of the Python courses through @codeclub to primary school children in the UK (aged 10-11) using IDLE and it works well. It's also worth considering that IDLE is a relatively lightweight install and on the network at the school that I teach at, everything is extremely locked down and installing anything causes an amount of pain. That said I think I'll still investigate.....
I've been teaching the curriculum of @codeclub for 4 years now (see elsewhere in this thread) as an optional after school club in the U.K. It's massively over subscribed every term, this past term I've had 50% coverage of the total number of students offered in that year group. So, no one is forced and it appears popular, but I guess your point is still valid that parents could be pushing the children. Subjectively, it feels like they want to do it though.....
Plus one for this option, I've been teaching the same curriculum for nearly 4 years now, it keeps getting better and better in terms of the resources available as a teacher.
I moved after I left Microsoft, and I never looked back. The key for me was doing it at the right time for me, but also within the right place. I would never have taken a management position at Microsoft! When I started I was in my late 30's, had recently had children and was just a different person to that which I'd been as an engineer. It was a natural progression. Many companies had offered me management positions previously, but I'd always turned them down as wrong place or wrong time. When I finally did move it was into a smallish Nordic company (about 150 staff), where I still had a good hands on potential. Then over the next 5 -6 years I slowly took increasingly senior roles and decreased the amount of technical work. In my current role I've not done a single technical thing and I'm extremely happy. I absolutely love managing technical staff and engineers, and they tell me I'm quite good at it. I put this down to many years of seeing how it shouldn't be done (particularly at Microsoft!) and my simple principle tends to be "done act like a dick". This along with positive reinforcement and a strengths based approach to my teams takes me a long way.
I still tinker at home but now my main outlet technically is teaching children to program through @codeclub.
If I was to say one thing, it's to chose the organisation you do such a move with very carefully. Just because a company is a great employer in one role does not make it a good one in another.
Yes,it's a UK tradition which, if I'm correct relates back to WW2 and growing your own stuff in harsh times. It's still really common in the UK and one can get a good plot of land (within London boundaries, maybe about 100 sq mt) for less than GBP100 per year, often within 1 or 2 miles from your house. It's a fantastic deal.
I'm back in the industry at the moment, but I did quit my job a few years back. I hired an allotment, grew a lot of vegetables, taught myself to bake bread and did a few other projects.
How was it? It was just great and it taught me about living on much smaller amounts of money, which is very helpful now that I have children and I work for a charity.
So maybe that's slightly off topic, and more of a career break than quitting the industry, but I'd still recommend it all the same.
favourites by category:
- fitness:
Becoming a supple leopard
- fiction:
Seveneves
- non fiction:
Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently
I've had a yahoo mail account for over 10 years now (and my wife has as well). For me it's a marginal account which I don't use that much (I keep it for family members to contact me who just can't get the idea of changing) but for her it's been a primary account which she's loved for many years (in terms of domain recognition). Their reliability has always been good in my opinion over these years, the problem is the quality of their web client which seems to have hardly moved on at all since I originally opened the accounts in 2005. My wife pulls her mail over iOS primarily so she doesn't notice, but I've always been surprised that they've never spent more time on this core service. Maybe that's a reflection of why they are where they are now though.....
Thing to note is that I didn't have the bug in 9.2.1 so I assume that something else changes within the upgrade process (i'm no iOS expert plainly) whether it be firmware of whatever, which doesn't get downgraded.
I find it somewhat questionable that I can revert to a previous version and still have that the problem the upgrade caused. I'm guessing this is my lack of understanding about mobile devices though. The whole process made me feel rather impotent compared to troubleshooting a PC or similar.
edit: (I should point out that I had to go to a laptop to post this comment, since the reply link still won't work on the iphone!)
I actually rolled back to 9.2.1 manually but this didn't fix it anyway, which was even more disappointing! Also the restore from backup was sooooo slow over the weekend, presumably because of all the 9.3 downloads, that after 24 hours my 2 gb backup was still stuck on estimating, so in the end I rebuilt from scratch. I'm glad that I have everything backed up elsewhere and not just in iCloud, which is of course the real moral of this story....always have multiple restore options!
Private Eye (subscriber to the print version), The Guardian (online, although am losing interest as it's becoming increasingly click bait as it tries to stop its massive financial losses, for many years I was a print subscriber), The Register (online), books (kindle and print)
the closest to anything really mainstream I'm aware of currently is CloudFare in Kenya. When I saw this last year it gave me some hope that the bigger players may start to look at Africa seriously in the near future. https://blog.cloudflare.com/mombasa-kenya-cloudflares-43rd-d...
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas - I discovered this via my volunteering with @codeclub teaching primary school children to program using scratch
Since 1870, the British Red Cross has been helping people in crisis, whoever and wherever they are, as part of the world’s largest humanitarian network. We're looking for technologists who want to use their skills to help people in crisis. We currently have 4 roles live with several more to come in the coming months
Live now:
-Senior Software Developer -Platform Operations Manager -Cyber Security Manager -Application Development Manager
Upcoming:
-Operations Engineers -Software Engineers -Service Designers -Front End Engineers -Delivery and Engineering Managers
Some of our benefits:
-True Flexible working (flexi hours / days / compression / location) -36 days annual leave plus the chance to purchase 5 extra days leave -Maternity, paternity, adoption, shared parental and careers leave -Pension scheme
If we don’t have a role which suits you today, please keep an eye on the jobs page above or DM me on LinkedIn @globalgoat. You can read more about us and our culture here https://medium.com/digital-and-innovation-at-british-red-cro...