The best of the nurseAdvance archive

I'm relaunching and refocusing the site. Rather than consign all the previous work I've posted to the trash bin of internet history, I thought it'd be useful to keep it online in an archived format, with a warning about broken links and a possibility some of it might grow a little dated. Only a week ago I received a lovely personal message about a guide I'd created way back for nurseAdvance, as well as a notification on Facebook telling me people were still discovering these articles for the first time!

So here is the best of what this site was: -

Why should nurses go beyond WordPress?

An explanation for why I spent weeks learning enough code to make my own site, when WordPress is obviously a lower technical barrier to getting content out. Still highly relevant for student nurses: learn to use WordPress, get a little experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, then discover the limitations you might want to move past.

Python makes coding useful and fun for nurses!

A little discussion on why Python is excellent as a coding language for nurses. Beautifully clear syntax and a vast ecosystem of first and third party libraries await!

Django makes web app development effortless

From all the possible alternatives, Django is still hard to touch if you want to quickly develop nursing web services. Powerful enough to support the origins of Reddit, Instagram, Spotify and more. If you want to know why Django is good enough for NASA (and why then it's probably of interest for nursing) this article might help.

Web scraping for nurses, using Python

A quick chat about how to automate the gathering of data from across the internet. The skills demonstrated here have only become more relevant to me as I've moved into research. I'll be writing an update on this one soon.

Is a weak password risking your nursing PIN and patient data?

The only nursing article of its kind to exist anywhere (that I'm aware of) on this highly important topic for securing patient personal data.

Ten essential blogs student nurses should be reading

One of the most asked questions of new students is "What should I subscribe to?" I never had decent advice on this from my university so I wrote this popular article. Recommendations need an update, but are still largely what I read on a regular basis.

Cloud hosting for nursing online

This article marks the start of increasingly technical content on the site, discussing why you might want to get familiar with cloud hosted services, like Amazon Web Services. This will only become more important as resource-demanding machine learning algorithms expand our possibilities.

Getting started with nursing textbooks

Clinical education content will eventually be moved to an entirely new site and project. In the meantime, I couldn't take this down as I still get feedback on how useful it is. Why do we expect students to navigate a long list of required and recommended reading with no further guidance than the book title?

nA interviews: Simon Clothier, founder of Student Nurse Journeys

Quite possibly the most popular article ever on the site. And one I'm most proud of - I could easily have sold this to a nursing periodical but I kept it openly accessibly and free here, because what Simon has achieved building his community is so incredibly important.

Is Flutter the best framework for nursing app development?

A blueprint for the future of the site, unashamedly technical as my own skills grew beyond a beginner level. In developing the first student nurse app made by a student nurse (probably), I got the attention of e-health industry professionals and I'm still not sure if I shouldn't have taken one of them up on a job offer instead of doing a PhD. Anyway, go read about Flutter, because Flutter is important!