Interesting Reads for the Week Ending July 2nd

Week five of interesting reads in the sixth week. I missed last week due to being on vacation.

The Rules

Here are the rules for what articles I choose to include in this weekly roundup:

1. It can’t be anything I wrote.
2. It has to be something I actually read. Nothing that simply had an interesting headline.
3. I have to have read it since the previous post. It does not have to be something that was written in the past week.
4. It has to be something I read online. In other words, it has to be a webpage with a URL.

The Reads

It seems now that To Fly a Drone in the U.S., You Now Must Pass FAA’s TRUST Test. I think the title doesn’t emphasize the fact that this is for flying recreationally. For fun. I think you already needed one to fly for business.

The FAA doesn’t administer the test themselves, however. They do have a list of approved test administrators. Even though I don’t even own a drone, I went ahead and took the TRUST test at the Boy Scout’s website.

For the last few months (April 12th through June 1st to be exact), Mint held a contest where you could win $10,000. This month - July 1st through the 31st - Mint is doing another contest with 10 weekly winners who will win $500 or $1,000. At the end of the month, there will be a grand prize of $50,000.

I didn’t win last time. I probably won’t win again. But the effort to log into Mint each day is minimal, so I might as well.

I haven’t played with it yet, but GitHub Copilot looks interesting. It’s like autocomplete with AI.

People were surprised when A Man Flew Through Times Square on a Colossal Drone.

The original Tweet with the video seems to be gone, but one of the replies also had a video:

Pretty cool! Needs to work on his steering though pic.twitter.com/osGYy5EyK2

— HEAVENLY CONTROLLER 👑 (@HeavenlyControl) June 21, 2021

Since I only have a few years left until I hit that age, I had to read Challenging the Myth That Programming Careers End at 40. Fortunately, there are people in their sixties who are still working on their craft.

This sounded exhausting - the author Tried to Network With 30 People in 30 Days. Networking - the people kind - is one of my biggest challenges, and it doesn’t help that I’m an introvert. In fact, networking is my go-to “greatest weakness” in job interviews.

This article resonated with me: Bad coding practices. 5 horrific techniques that will make your co-developers really hate your code. So many times I come across a variable that either doesn’t describe what it does or is abbreviated beyond all recognition. C’mon, people, you’re not saving anything by cutting out a few letters in that there variable name! Plus - copy and pasted code is not using the same code.

I mentioned a few weeks about how I have an exercise routine. I figured I needed to add stretches to my routine, so I found this beginner’s guide to mobility & stretching. That guide from Men’s Health has six not-too-difficult stretches, along with animated gifs showing how the stretches are done.