Back at the end of 2012, I wrote about my first edX learning experience taking the Software as a Service course. Over the course of 2013, I participated in several other free online courses and I am a firm believer that constantly learning is well worth it and helps keep you sharp.

Whilst working in various different .NET-based projects, I can find myself doing the same things over and over again. Quite often, this can be copied and pasted from one project to another or re-implemented slightly differently from one project to another. I don't think this is the best approach, so I've decided to start bringing together all these bits and pieces to form MarkEmbling.Utils.

Backups: we all know that they're vital. Right? Backups are really really important. To that end, I've written storelet, a tiny little library for easily writing simple backup scripts using Python.

Last weekend I found myself needing to make use of the Google Spreadsheet API using a service account to manage spreadsheets belonging to users of a Google Apps domain from within a .NET application.

Recently I completed the Software as a Service course on edX (CS169.1x) and felt it might be worth sharing some thoughts about the experience, and why I think edX and others like it are game-changing.

Way way back in 2009, I decided to look into Python. For one reason or another that didn't really go any further than playing about with Fabric but I've decided once again that it is a language I'd really like to get more involved in. However when looking to start a new project in Python, there is one very big question: Python 2 or 3? Which should I focus on and use?