This post is more of a personal aspiration than a product or service you can consume as a reader. My apologies.

I have a personal GitHub profile. I created that profile because I would like to build some useful scripts and share a portfolio of coding examples. At the moment I’m particularly interested in Chris Lovejoy’s YouTube Algorithm (The Internet Archive Wayback Machine version) and would like to build my own version of it. However my Python skills are elementary and I have never scheduled GitHub code as a recurring task. So that is very much a stretch goal.

Unfortunately I also have a higher-priority conflicting goal: to reduce the amount of time I sit in a chair in and type on a keyboard during my evenings and weekends. Life is short and I want to move around in the great outdoors as much as I can. Goodness knows we all take our physical abilities for granted most days. As I create this post I’m standing at my homemade Vancouver Island cedar standing desk. That’s a preliminary attempt to balance those two goals.

I think the biggest promise of:

• Augmented Reality technologies (e.g. Pokemon Go, etc.), and
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) (e.g. Echo Silver)

is to find a way to be as physically active as possible, while also improving digital skills at the same time. It would be great to be able to go for a walk and have a learning platform interact with GitHub, so I could write code using voice commands and gestures while also getting my steps in.

Perhaps gyms might have an easy path-to-market, because they might be able to associate specific machines, free weights, medicine balls, or motions with functions…? There’s also a potential for collaborative coding, because there would be a need to share a piece of equipment to activate/access a function? I realize this wouldn’t appeal to all personality types, but I would be interested in a team building exercise where people use Virtual Reality (VR) devices and gym equipment to automate a routine business process. That seems much more purposeful than an escape room or an obstacle course.

If you have a great method of keeping your heart rate up while you also learn to write code, please let me know how you do that in the comments below!