New year, new skill

Happy New Year, dear readers! Hope you had a good Christmas break and are attacking 2012 with renewed enthusiasm.

Some of the most interesting bits of my new year aren't (yet) bloggable, but I can say that renewed attention to by chartership portfolio is on the cards, as is my participation in Code Year.

Code Year is a course that teaches you to program in JavaScript, a programming language particularly used for web-based things. I've done the first week's lesson, which brought flooding back a few basic programming functions (calling variables, if/else, for loops, while loops) that I once vaguely knew about as taught by my dear dad. How I wish that eight-year-old me had pursued that further!

More and more of my professional conversations in the last year have been about coding and mashups in libraries, particularly for re-using bibliographic data in helpful and interesting ways. So Code Year couldn't have come at a better time: programming is something I've also suspected I might end up doing, and I'll never get round to learning much without some external force encouraging me. We'll see how it goes: even if I don't complete it, hopefully it'll at least have de-mystified some things for me.

If you're interested in taking part, you might like to know that on Twitter there's the hashtag #codeyear for the general programme, #libcodeyear for library folk taking part, and #catcode for cataloguers (there are a lot of them) taking part. There's also the catcode wiki which is collecting together useful resources.

In other news, I haven't completely forgotten cpd23, and will be looking at the remaining things soon. And before that, you'll find me guest blogging on the Libraries@Cambridge 2012 conference blog on Thursday, where I'll be writing up parallel session B: The Digital Library.