Ada Lovelace Day 2018 - Dr Hannah Fry

I've not done posts for Ada Lovelace Day since 2015, for no good reason I can think of. This year I'm highlighting Dr Hannah Fry.

Her book, Hello World, was released recently, so she's quite active on Twitter at the moment promoting that.

My hand is still hurting three days later & by the end my name had morphed into 'Hammah Fly', but the good news is that there are signed copies of Hello World up on the Waterstones website: https://t.co/KMCwbvRzPa #HelloWorld pic.twitter.com/19pV10rerc

— Hannah Fry (@FryRsquared) August 6, 2018

I've picked her because she's a good broadcaster and explainer of maths. I particularly enjoy the Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry, a 10 minute radio programme where they answer questions put by listeners. Each episode seems much longer as they pack so much in. The podcast version is a lot longer, so worth listening to in preference to the radio show.

You can see a list of other programmes she's done on her media page. I've enjoyed all of those that I've seen. This is my favourite tweet she's done (because I get the joke):

I baked a tau. pic.twitter.com/QTrtS7OdlV

— Hannah Fry (@FryRsquared) October 10, 2017

My previous Ada Lovelace Day posts are here.

Work for me!

We're advertising a Business Systems Assistant job to help share my workload. If you've come here after being there, then full marks for doing your homework. Mention this blog post should you be called to interview and you may get bonus points.

If you think that a Macbook is standard issue, then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. That's stock photography for you. I don't much talk about what I do here, because it's mostly behind the firewall. However, with moving to Salesforce and launching a website (within a couple of days of each other) last year, and with moving to SunSystems and Workday later this year, and next year, there's a lot of work to be done. Plus we're doing a lot more in terms of fundraising, which means that people are hungry for data. So I've got enough work for two people, which is why we need another one!

Morriss' law(s)

I recently came across a couple of lists of software development laws:
The eponymous laws of software development
Laws of software development

I may or may not have publicly stated Morriss' law:

Every site/program/app attempts to expand until it resembles Twitter

See Facebook, Skype, Confluence

However on one of those lists I cam across:

Zawinski’s Law

This law addresses software bloat and states…

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

I was going to state Morriss' second law, which is like the first one, but has "until it has Stories", but I think there's Morriss' greater law at work here, which is something like:

If they copy you, you're doing something right.

 There's probably a better way of saying it though.

Free Salesforce postcode checker

While you can get Salesforce apps that check postcodes for you, here's a bit of Javascript that will check a UK postcode for you using the postcodes.io API and tell you if it's valid or not. It's not clever enough to suggest what the postcode might be, but then it is free.

Create a new button on the Contact object (Display Type: Detail Page Button, Behaviour: Execute JavaScript) and put this javascript on it:

{!REQUIRESCRIPT("/soap/ajax/20.0/connection.js")} 
var postcode = '{!Contact.MailingPostalCode}'; 
if (postcode != '') { 
postcode = postcode.replace(' ','%20'); 
sforce.connection.remoteFunction({ 
url : 'http://api.postcodes.io/postcodes/'+postcode+'/validate', 
async : true, 
cache : false, 
method: "GET", 
onSuccess : function(response) { 
if (response.slice(-5) == 'true}') { 
alert('OK'); 
} else { 
alert('Wrong - check using https://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode'); 
} 
}, 
onFailure : function(response) { alert('ERROR: '+response); } 
}); 
}

For the Account object use

{!Account.BillingPostalCode}

or

{!Account.ShippingPostalCode}

as appropriate.