Code Post

Week 3

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 02:48:26 -0400

This week was spent brainstorming rough design ideas and layouts. Using the research from last week and the sketches from this week Tony and I decided upon the rough layout for the iPlayer application.

For my independent learning this week I completed chapters 1 - 4 of the Apress text book and watched the first three lectures from the stanford tutorials. The apress book focused mainly on the interface elements of the iOS SDK and how you can use them to work together. The Stanford lectures where more technical and focussed more heavily on the objective-c programming language. Together both resources where a great introduction to iOS development.

The first assignment for the stanford lectures was to create a basic calculator using a stack as the calculator brain. The course provides a detailed walkthrough of how to complete it and I found it to be a great introduction.

Images of calculator app.

Week 2

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 02:13:29 -0400

This week I began research for the iPlayer design and started looking for resources for the independent learning portion of the subject.

For the iPlayer design I looked mainly at existing video player and news apps in the app store. I was looking for any design features that make an app standout and feel unique, along with ways that other app designers have handled some of the problems I will encounter when developing the iPlayer. As the iPlayer is the first app I will be developing I can’t be sure what these problems will be, though the main design issues I am planning for are:

displaying a large amount of images on the small iPhone screen.
custom video player controls for controlling different quality video streams.
more intuitive video searching, ie. skipping ahead in videos.
maximising the amount relevant information on the homepage of the application.

App Research Review

USA TODAY

This app stood out for the way they display the feature video. I think most people would only watch a couple of videos at a time when they are using an app on their phone so having the top stories featured prominently helps people to find the most interesting content. I also like the layout of their ‘navigation page’ the coloured links stand out from the rest of the monotone design.

Another standout was the BBC iPlayer. They opted for side scrolling instead of vertical scrolling and I think it works really well with their layout. They have either one big video or two small video images per view, and it changes as you scroll through their content. I like the design but think having both a top and bottom bars takes up a lot of valuable screen real estate. Also th

CS 106B Study Group

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:18:00 -0500

I have just finished the CS106A - Programming Methodology course offered online by Stanford, it was awesome and I learned a lot, but completing it on my own was fairly lonely. As the new semester has just started at Stanford it would be an good time to start on another of their computer science classes, and this time around I’m trying to find people to do it with me.

The class I’m going to be following along with CS106B - Programming Abstractions, the website is here if you want more information. Basically you can access all of the assignments and handouts and the lectures are available on itunes.

As far as the study group goes we could get a small forum going or / study groups etc. basically motivation to keep each other going and ask questions. If you interested leave a comment, email me or contact me on twitter and we can get started :)

Top 5 Ruby Based Interactive Programming Sites

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 02:34:00 -0500

Interactive programming sites are awesome, although most of them don’t have a huge amount of content on them, they are a great place to spend a couple of days learning. I’m learning Ruby at the moment so I thought I’d create a list of my favourite interactive sites that teach ruby.

1. Try bloc - A great site that starts out with ruby / rails and moves into Javascript later on. Really nice if your interested in web app development, and it looks as though they will be moving into other topics in the near future.

2. Ruby Monk - Fairly similar to try bloc, although going through the basics a few times when your starting out is always good. They’re both worth completing.

3. Code School - Tutorials on coffescript, javascript, html, css3 and ruby / rails. It’s rails for zombies tutorial was a huge success, I would recommend you know a little bit about ruby before diving in though.

4. Try Ruby - A short 15 minute intro to ruby, recommended if your just starting out.

5. Hackety-hack - A good place to start if you have done absolutely no programming before. It assumes you know nothing about programming which makes it great for total beginners.

Beginning Vim for beginner programmers.

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 06:35:08 -0500

There are plenty of other guides to getting started with vim but I find most of them to be a bit long or overly complex. If your a beginner developer like me you don’t want to waste hours trying to get vim setup and looking nice.

This guide aims to get vim setup quickly and then point you to some quick tutorials so you can familiarise yourself with the shortcuts and start navigating around your code. Once you are comfortable with the commands you can learn all about the different customisations available.

Step 1: Install

Although vim comes standard on most unix systems I would recommend downloading a GUI version to begin with. I recommend macvim which you can get here: http://code.google.com/p/macvim/

Step 2: Installing Macvim

Install the program as normal and move the script to your PATH (the script lets you open macvim from a terminal window, details below if you need help with that.)

Heres a link to learn more about what your PATH is and what it does : What is my PATH?

If you are unsure what your ‘path’ is, simply type ‘echo $PATH’ into a terminal. It should return something like this: ”/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin”

Next type ‘cd /usr/bin’ into your terminal followed by ‘open .’

You can then simply drag the script file into the folder you just opened (you might need to enter you system password depending on your user privileges).

Step 3: Get started

Macvim doesn’t look too good out of the box but it is easy to make it look great and people share their customisations frequently.

Now you have vim installed and working, go through a few tutorials to get familiar with how it works.

1. Type ‘vimtutor’ into terminal and work through its excellent tutorial.

2. After you’ve completed that tutorial I HIGHLY recommend the ‘smash into vim’ series from Peepcode. It will get you well on your way to being an expert in vim and provides great insights on how to customise vim to your own tastes.

Pinspire spams Pinterest, advertising their clone site.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 05:08:00 -0500

For those that don’t know Pinspire is a Samwer brothers clone of the exploding Pinterest website.

Today I logged into Pinterest to be met by a strange request from someone asking for my permission to repin a picture to Pinspire.

A quick look around and you can find hundreds of comments exactly like this one, all from accounts with no activity on the Pinterest site apart from comments like these.

Obviously scummy tactics from a crappy clone…

App Developers Resources

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:32:00 -0500

Really great info graphic for App Developers

[Source: iPhone App Design]

Binary Log: One month on the iOS App Store

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 18:42:26 -0500

Binary Log: One month on the iOS App Store :

This is a great honest post about their experience on releasing an app on the app store. They provide actual numbers so its a great place to compare your results against for any project.

binarylog:

We released our first iPhone app early in December. It’s called Bike Maps and it lets you look up Google bicycle directions with a fast, native interface. We struggled to find any sales information for iOS apps before we got started. Inspired by Patrick McKenzie’s open business…

12 Monthly Goals / Resolutions for Beginner Developers

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 06:27:00 -0500

Since I started setting myself goals it’s been much easier to keep track of how I’m progressing and it’s definitely a great form of motivation that gives you something to aim for. When I first started teaching myself to code it was: complete this tutorial by this date or read this book by this date. Once I realised that I learn more by working on projects, it has turned into get this (small) project done in 2 weeks etc…

Inspired by Matt Might’s post I decided to come up with 12 monthly goals / resolutions for myself and other beginner developers.

More details about each goal below the list:

Start a blog and post often / every week.
Start a new project .
Release a new project.
Read a book.
Go to a meetup in your area.
Participate in an online course.
Practice design.
Learn git or source control.
Write tests for your projects.
Complete a tutorial.
Watch online videos / listen to podcasts.
Try a new editor.

Start a blog

Everyone, no matter where they are in their career, or how much they know has something to share. A blog also helps you to get yourself out there and meet people with similar interests which is HUGE for people trying to learn to code. Starting a blog is easy to do but posting regularly is much more difficult. Apparently getting into a routine and posting regularly is the best way to make sure you keep at it.

Start a new project

Tackling projects are by far the best way to learn something. Start with something you think is small and you begin to realise how much thought goes into building something of value. You will stumble into problems you had no idea about and learn about all kinds of ways to deal with them.

Release a project

Once you’ve started a project, finishing it is super important. By setting a goal to release it to the public you’ll force yourself to build it to the best you can. Dealing with a release will also open up a whole range of new things for you to learn about, from servers / hosting to marketing.

Read a book

It doesn’t necessarily have to be related to what your learning about, you will always gain something from reading.

Go to a meetup in your area

Head to meetup.com or google for some groups / events in your area. They’re an awesome way to meet people who are eager to help beginners and getting involved in the community is one of the best ways to make sure you stick to something.

Participate in a online course

Theres ALOT of resources online, but not enough people take advantage of the courses offered by Stanford, MIT. The Stanford introduction to programming course (cs106) is really good, the lectures are fun and you can follow along on the class website with actual students.

Practice Design

Having a good sense of design is important for all developers whether or not you plan to use it a lot. Like anything the only way to get better at it is practice. Just think how useful it would be to make the projects your going to release look awesome.

Learn git or a form of source control.

Git is probably the most popular form of source control right now and is a MUST for anyone who is learning to code. Not only is it the best way to keep your projects organised, and backed up but it’s a skill that most employers look for as well and is pretty much essential if you want to start contributing to open source projects.

Write tests for your project

I don’t do enough of this so I can’t comment, but tests are vital if you want to write stable code that works. If your starting out like me this is a habit you want to get into from the start.

Complete a tutorial

Once you’ve finished a couple of small projects, go back to that tutorial you didn’t quite understand and you’ll find out how much you’ve learnt. You’ll also learn a lot from being able to finish it now :)

Watch online videos / listen to podcasts

This is a nice easy resolution to keep but can be hugely beneficial, there are hundreds of great resources out there for learning about coding / development / startups etc.

My favourites. This week in startups, railscasts, This week in web design, Mixergy, Stuff you missed in history class

Try a new editor

Trying new things is always good, and your work setup is something you use everyday. Make sure its perfect by trying new things all the time.

Great list of learn online programming sites.

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 00:17:00 -0500

robot_zombie (reddit) has an put together a really nice list of online programming sites.

Here’s the link:

http://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/lpgg9/sites_like_codecademy/c2ukpz7

And here’s the list as of (4/1/2012)

Interactive Tutorials

rubymonk —ruby, gamification
tryruby —ruby
hackety-hack —ruby, not exactly in the browser, haven’t tried
codeschool —ruby, rails, html, css, jquery, some paid / some free, really nice setup, gamification
codecademy —javascript, gamification
eloquentjavascript —javascript, book style
css3please —css, somewhat
trypython —python, uses silverlight
Try Python —python, uses ajax
Learn Python —python
crunchy —python?, haven’t tried
tryhaskell —haskell, haven’t tried
tryfsharp —haven’t tried

Interactive DB Tutorials

mongodb —mongo database, haven’t tried
sqlzoo —sql intro, haven’t tried, seems simple

Interactive Editor Tutorial

openvim —vim

Online Editors —good place to try simple html, css, javascript out is

Video Lesson Sites

Lynda —subscription based
ThinkVitamin —subscription based, good but doesn’t feel as in-depth as lynda.com
Learnable —subscription based, new so hard to say
OCW —more than just programming available
theNewBoston —kittydorkdork vouches for theNewBostons quality
p2pu —haven’t tried
Khan Academy —per johnp80
Hacker CS —haven’t tried
Google Code University
OpenClassroom —per kinship
cs50 —per wcbdfy
academicearth —per kinship
peepcode —per Nooshu

Programming Practice

ProjectEuler —math required
Codingbat —haven’t tried
codeforces —per byah
topcoder —per byah

Startup Coding Challenges

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:53:00 -0500

One day I would love to work at a startup or maybe start my own company. It’s one of the reasons I started teaching myself to code. As most beginner developers (like me) probably aren’t sure about what level they need to be to land themselves a job, coding challenges are a good test. They are great ideas for small projects you can work on, and an excellent way to standout from other people applying for jobs.

Heres a list of startups and their coding challenges:

Dropbox - http://www.dropbox.com/jobs/challenges

Instagram - http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/12651721845/instagram-engineering-challenge-the-unshredder

Quora - http://www.quora.com/challenges

Indinero - https://indinero.com/jobs (shown on each job page)

DrChrono- (i0S Challenge) https://drchrono.com/site_media/pdf/drchrono_ipad_programmer_test.pdf

Stripe - https://stripe.com/jobs

Spotify - http://www.spotify.com/uk/jobs/tech/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php

Interview Street - http://www.interviewstreet.com/recruit/challenges/

If you know of any others let me know, I would love to make the list longer.

Interest and Motivation are the most important aspects of success.

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:34:00 -0500

When I started teaching myself to code I was just working through books and tutorials, not really enjoying myself and getting pissed off about how long it was taking me to learn anything. There had to be a better way. I used to spend hours researching how other people learned to code. That’s when I read the best piece of advice I’ve found about learning something new or starting any big project.

Find something you WANT to do, START and ADAPT along the way.

Dont worry about which languages or frameworks you should learn first, or whether your idea is good enough. If you want to do it, start and adapt along the way.

When you work on a project you want to be doing you spend more time on it and you are also focused. That’s the most important thing while learning. Focused practice.

This idea can be applied to any big undertaking, from learning, to starting your own company. Find something you will enjoy doing, start doing it and fix any mistakes you make along the way. You probably don’t know enough to make the right decisions at the beginning anyway, and once you start you’ll be on your way to 10,000 hours.

How to get an internship.

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:09:00 -0500

After a couple of months of teaching my self to code I decided that trying to find and internship would be an awesome way to help speed up the process. The internship didn’t need to be paid, I just wanted somewhere that could provide me with an fun learning environment and give me some experience and insight into how professionals work.

In general developers love helping other people out, and as long as you are legitimately interested in learning it shouldn’t be to hard to find an internship. Here are some steps to take:

1. Reach out to people.

There are a lot of different places to find people in the tech community in your area. The best resources for me have been meetup.com and mailing lists for different programming languages in your country. Sending people a short email introducing yourself and asking for some help/advice is a great way to make connections and find places that are looking for an intern.

2. Start an online presence

Even if you think your work isn’t worth sharing right now it’s never to early to start an account on github, start writing a blog, follow great programmers on twitter and generally try to put yourself out there.

3. Attend meetups

Most cities have multiple programming related meetups. Head over to meetup.com and look for some in your area. They’re the best way to meet new people and the organisers are always looking for new people to attend.

Since I started my internship it has been awesome, seeing how professional programmers work and learning about programming in teams is really important and eye opening for your education.

Using these steps I was lucky enough to find the awesome people at Ennova in Brisbane.

Shout out to Lucas Willett (@ltw_), Odin Dutton (@twe4ked), Nathaniel Kane and Jason Weathered (@jasoncodes) who make up the amazing dev team and create some great work.

Keep your Rails Project Sane

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 01:08:28 -0500

schneems:

We’ve all been there, we start a new project with grand hopes and aspirations. But soon enough our project turns into one big ball of mud. In this presentation I talk about some commonly mistakes in Rails and how to keep your project Sane.

I gave this presentation at Austin On Rails and it was filmed by Austin Tech Videos.

Learn coding online sites are missing the point.

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:56:00 -0500

In the last couple of months there have been a number of new sites appearing that teach people to code online, ruby monk, code academy, try bloc they all do basically the same thing in the same way. They give a bunch of exercises to work through and once your finished thats it. I don’t know what caused all these sites to appear but I think they’re missing some critical aspects that make online learning a success.

There are many factors that contribute to a students success and satisfaction in Web-based courses, but the biggest one is interaction. In the field of distance education there are three different types of interaction (Moore, 2005).

1. Interaction between learner and content

2. Interaction between learner and instructor

3. Interaction between learner and learner.

A fourth kind of interaction, interaction between learner and interface was suggested later but is now definitely a huge part of these websites.

So on the scorecard these sites are nailing the interaction with interface, and doing pretty well with interaction between content. Although the content available is pretty limited, the sites can be forgiven as they’re just starting up. But are totally failing in the remaining to categories.

To be successful and create a meaningful learning experience these sites are going to have to be really good in at least 3 out of the four categories. They need to add some sort of interaction between learner and learner, or learner and instructor. Adding instructors makes costs skyrocket so I guess learner to learner is all they have left to work with. Not only would it make for a much better product than their competitors but it would also build a community of people interested in learning and helping each other out.

Moore, Joi, and Kyung-sun Kim. “Web Based Learning: Factors Affecting Students Satisfaction and Learning Experience.” First Monday. 7 Nov. 2005. Web. <http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1294/1214>.

Recollect Engineering: Solving Instagram's Unshredder with Mechanical Turk and $0.50

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 18:05:00 -0500

Recollect Engineering: Solving Instagram's Unshredder with Mechanical Turk and $0.50:

Interesting take on Instagram’s Unshredder problem.

recollectcode:

By now you’ve probably seen the Instagram Engineering Challenge: The Unshredder and a few solutions including one written purely in Canvas and Javascript. I don’t know any company code blogs that solve other company code blogs’ engineering challenges but that sounds meta enough to be awesome, so…

Project Ideas For Beginner Web Devs

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:59:00 -0500

Since starting out in development I’ve found that I learn the most when I just sit down and try and complete a project, instead of reading through books or tutorials. In animation when you’re learning its important to keep your projects small so that you can go through the whole creating process from start to finish in a relatively small amount of time.

I think the same applies to web development and if you’re like me and find it hard to come up with ideas for each project (honestly I dont think it matters what I’m working on at this stage but I still spend way to much time thinking about it) I’ve created a list of a few things you could try.

Chris Oliver has a nice list of 10 projects on his blog: http://excid3.com/blog/10-ideas-for-beginner-web-developers/ Ive added them below aswell.

A site to organise your fantasy football/basketball/baseball league.
Find a company with an API that your interested in and build something with that. (e.g. Klout or Punchfork or Instagram)
A time tracking application - log what you’ve done each day.
Online version of a simple board game
Look on builditwith.me for some project ideas
Try and find a project on weekendhacker.net

Chris’ suggestions:

Simple blog with comments
Pastebin that has short urls (Google some short url algorithms)
Make a todo list website (without Javascript)
Go back and add authentication (I used devise) to #1 and #2
Build a site to send text messages for you using Twilio
Create a small site to upload files to using Amazon S3′s free account
Go Back to #3 and Ajaxify it all. Add user accounts (with email reminders). I built Fluttrly.com somewhat like this.
Build your own JSON and XML API onto #3 or any of the other sites
Now take that API you just built and create a Ruby gem out of it using ActiveResource
Certainly by now you should have come up with some ideas of your own that you’d like to build. If not, go build an expense tracker with pretty graphs and export to CSV or Freshbooks functionality.

If you have any other ideas add a comment and I’ll add them to the list.

Find a small problem and fix it

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:30:02 -0500

I like this post by Julio Camarena. As a beginner developer trying to solve a big problem probably isn’t the best way to learn. But I don’t think it takes a huge amount of time to get to the point where you have the technical ability to build a solution to a small problem.

The smaller the problem the better, find something you wish was easier and build a solution. Spend a bit of time ‘marketing’ it and putting your self out there and you’ll learn a lot of different skill that will always come in handy.

http://jcamarena.com/toughts/find-a-small-problem-and-build-a-simple-solution/

Workflow: Development vs Animation

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:45:00 -0500

In animation, workflow is a massive deal. People spend a lot of time thinking about the way they approach their scenes and while everyone has some subtle differences there are basically two main ways of working. Straight ahead and pose to pose.

Straight ahead is basically what it sounds like, you pick a starting pose for your action and then move forward a frame or two and do the next one. What it lacks in structure, straight ahead makes up for in giving animation a certain flow and fluidity thats harder to achieve when working in a pose to pose style. Pose to pose on the other hand is much more structured, you pick the ‘key’ poses in your scene and set them out so you have a very rough overview of what your scene will look like. Then you keep going over your animation breaking each section down until your done. It gives you a framework to work within from an early stage and gives structure to a pretty complex creative problem.

At the moment I don’t really have a very structured development workflow, its an oversimplified comparison but I feel like I’m working straight ahead. I pick a point to start and just go until I’m done. As with animation I’m sure this is a horrible way for a beginner to learn.

While the syntax of a programming language inherently gives you some sort of structure, I could definitely use a more consistent way of working. After a bit of looking round it seems like test driven development is what I’m looking for. It provides a quick way of adding some more structure to what your working on and helps break things down into more manageable chunks. With rails and rspec hopefully I’m heading in the right direction.

If you’ve got any tips on workflow I would love to hear about them.

Learning to code. 3 Month retroactive diary.

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:33:34 -0500

About three months ago I decided to leave my job as an animator and teach myself to code, inspired by people like proudN00b, this guy and what is probably now hundreds of other posts on hacker news about people doing the same thing.

I always intended to start a blog from the beginning. Mainly to help myself get in contact with people doing the same thing, keep track of my progress and to hopefully help anyone who does the same thing in the future.

Obviously I never got the blog started from day one, but in the spirit of the sports guy I’m going to start with a retro diary to get back up to speed. Lets pick things up in month 1.

Month 1:

Being completely new to all of computer science and the world of programming I had no idea where to start. So I spent my days reading posts on quora and stackoverflow, about c vs c++, and which programming language should I start with.
Total waste of time. Eventually I landed on javascript, for a few reasons. Theres a bunch of resources for total beginners that start from the VERY beginning, learning what a variable was and the difference between floating points and integers was what I needed and theres quite alot of that available for javascript.

After that I just started working through tutorials, and getting stuck… I went through about 5 different ‘walkthroughs’ before I managed to get through one without running into some error that I didn’t understand. It was totally frustrating but I learnt that you just need to keep going and trust that you’ll learn things in the future that will help fix your mistakes from the past.

Things learnt:

1. It doesn’t matter which language you start with, just start. The basics are similar for most langauges and if your like me at this point you don’t know enough to make the right decision anyway.

2. Just keep going when you get stuck or don’t understand something. If you run into a problem or something you don’t understand look around for another explanation but don’t waste days getting lost on something that is over your head.

Month 2:

After playing around with javascript for a little bit, and having read every possible post about which language a beginner should start with, I inevitably stumbled into “bigger” languages like ruby and python and their frameworks (rails / django).

Over the first month of tutorials and reading everything I could about learning to code I realized I wanted to lean towards web development. For some reason at this point I wanted to start learning ruby / rails. I liked the name more than python… and that was pretty much my reason for choosing one over the other. I read somewhere that you should try and learn at least the basics of ruby before getting started with rails and I would definitely suggest that to anyone else getting started aswell.

I started reading Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. got to about chapter 4 and shit got crazy so I started looking for something a bit more focussed on beginners. Thats where I found Chris Pine’s Learn to Program. It covers the basics really well and has exercises that make working through it much more fun. It’s by far the best resource I have found for a beginner, although I think the reason I enjoyed this book so much is I already had about a month of experience and I could get my head around the basics more easily. I worked through the book, understood about 70% of it and learned a ton.

Things I learnt:

1. While reading books and doing tutorials is a great way to get started, its like riding a bike with training wheels, your not going to fall over but they slow you down alot. I found I wasn’t learning as fast as I wanted and they also get really boring after a while.

Month 3:

The first week or two of the month I spent in rails tutorials but after a couple of months of tutorials and books I really wanted to see what I could do on my own. What should I build? I spent a couple of days googling and thinking about it until I realised again that it didn’t matter and I just had to start something. I decided on a basic to-do list app in rails. After a couple of days I was angry about how little I could do without help but was amazed at how much faster I was learning.

Things I learnt:

1. Building something on your own is the best way to learn. Supplement it with books / tutorials wherever you feel like but make sure they’re taking up less than half of your time. For me finding where I got stuck and googling for solutions has sped up my learning process alot and is what im going to continue to do from now on.

So now I’m up to date with where I’m at and hopefully someone finds it interesting. Would love anyone to comment or contact me if you read even half of the post :).