Udacity launches new "class" feature Career Advisor Program forStudents who study programming online

Udacity new feature Career Advisory Program report, review, and offering walkthrough.Udacity announces new programming initiative - a career advisory service for online students seeking a job as a Front-End Web Developer, Full Stack Web Developer, iOS developer, android developer, and data analyst (basically all of its nano degree tracks. Think of this service as a derivative of the growth and expansion of Udacity nanodegree programs. With the hefty price tag of those programs, paying customers demand better job placements upon graduation). 

Services

What's Included

A direct connection to our hiring partners with your Udacity profile Interview practice and resources Expert review of your personal brand (resume, LinkedIn and GitHub profiles) Training for cover letter writing and other important communications A free resume review during your free trial The meat of the offering is really Udacity's hiring partners programs As usual, Udacity boasts premium partners like Google (which is always on the list, given the founder Sebastian T's Google background). However, the real effectiveness of these programs and their placement rates are largely unknown. There's no objective 3rd party report of such numbers.  It is reported by Udacity itself that its hiring partners include Google,  AT&T, Microsoft, and Priceline. These are not the sexiest of Silicon Valley tech companies. However, they do hire a very large number of developers. May be newly minted developers should consider these larger and less sexy companies after all.  Udacity's career support is still limited. It seems to lean towards sending students out in into the internet to fend for themselves. Often you will find Udacity career service refer to external resources. Some of them are quite good, such as pramp, but keep in mind, within Udacity the opportunity is limited.

Udacity Adds 3 More Google Courses - Online Education MOOC News

Announced via +Udacity  newsletter today: Udacity adds three more +Google Developers  sponsored software engineering, development, programming courses to its growing professional curriculum. All basic course material access is free of charge. Udacity is digging deeper in its specialization in real-world professional software development curriculum. This time it teaches you how to build apps with Google. Pretty impressive. Grab your free Google Development course content now.

Developing Scalable Apps in Python with Google App Engine

a course on Python and cloud computing with Google App Engine

Already 1500 students strong. Learn how to really do Cloud Computing with Google's App Engine, leveraging Google data centers. 6 weeks of advanced coursework.

Browser Rending Optimization 

aka Building 60 FPS Web Apps
a course on web performance

Already 3500+ students strong. This month-long advanced course. Learn how to build 60 frames per second (FPS) web apps and learn how to improve web performance. Developers will learn how to build apps that render smoothly.

Responsive Images

a course on working with images front-end development

This is an intermediate two-week long course with nearly 3000 students. Google will teach you how to use responsive images responsibly (LOL). This class will walk through the <picture> HTML element, <img> and the srcset attribute. A great short course for front end developers.

App nation 2013 recap and productivity apps

Productivity Apps
These are my personal opinions on productivity apps. Please critique make suggestions! Would love to hear from you.


Task Management Productivity
NEW~ Shoots&Leaves reviewed: could it be the developer friendly todo / task management that hackers always wanted? 

An app that I always wanted: turns a photo snapshot of the moment into a reminder / clipboard text / todos even markdowns! This is got to be a developer favorite. I am still testing it but wrote my review already, because the hacker friendliness
My review: One of my productivity finds. I always take picture info/task for myself but they easily get lost in the cameraroll. I like this app for allowing me to upload to imgur right away or to Dropbox if I want to be private. I don't think I have to give it permission to access my cameraroll, a privacy plus of course. Most fun of all it allows templating, a mustache like coder friendly syntax that allows dynamically forming texts: Read {{title}} by EOD {{url}} . Or even markdown! Win. Still testing 5 star for now, working and not crashing
The name seems to be spin of the popular yet humorous grammar, writing and etiquette book Eats, Shoots & Leaves (do you know what it means? ;-)
Wunderlist
Fast speed yet powerful todo list management with recurring task scheduling (a big productivity boost), categorization, star/favoriting, reminder and clock. Easy to use across all Mac and Apple mobile platforms. Drag and drop features.
Asana
For embodying agile development practice, task prioritization and management with easy drag and drop and also reprioritization / reordering. Keyboard smart, can reduce mouse clicking.
Logistics Productivity
Fancy Hands +Fancy Hands
I like Fancy Hands because it is a subscription plan for a number of fixed requests each month. Say I pay $25 dollars for a 5 request plan, making it a merely $5 dollars per request. It is incredible! The staff is US based, and English-speaking, which can be very helpful in certain geo-specific tasks and tasks that require cultural backgrounds like passion for the super bowl.  The most important part is that I don't have to hire by the hour, or negotiate the rate / quote for each task. If I have time for that logistics, I didn't have to get a virtual assistant help in the first place.

Fancy Hands review - affordable efficient virtual assistants
Career Productivity
Levo resume
A women friendly and aesthetically pleasing free resume builder tool made by a classy virtual community online +Levo League  that aims to promote women's career successes! It's enjoyable to use.

Levo League Resume Builder Phone App
Social Network Productivity
Using private social media networks like Path +Path
I use Path because it is intimate. I can tone down my sharing filter instead of worrying intensely about PR and impact. It auto shares (given permission) some of my social data like geolocation, sleep time, status and views, saves me time. It allows me to share contents like music and books, saves a lot of explanations.

Path -  a private social network
Coding Productivity
AirPair +Air Pair
I use AirPair to level up after attending code school and attending hackathons. It allows me to meet one-on-one with an expert and get a high quality session tailored to my needs. Will write a guest blog post on airpair about it soon! I can imagine AirPair is also good for developers learning new technologies but already are busy with projects at hand or have their billable hours filled up. This is a quick efficient to get started.

AirPair - pair programming and coding for developer productivity
Mental Storage and Information Management Productivity
Evernote (link to premium only, normal signup use evernote.com)
I use Evernote to manage my forever growing knowledge and skill notes. As I study more and more coding, trying to stay on top of business and marketing, I need memory and storage. Evernote is lightweight and works everywhere. I use the premium plan for massive uploads and OTC recognition - an effort to digitize all my documents to reduce cluster. Evernote was famously described as the external brain. We definitely need one in this information age.
Same Day Delivery Services if you value your time
Department store shopping like Toys R Us Lowe's  - eBay Now
Mini food catering and satisfying tapioca / boba or Philz coffee cravings  promo code fpt2 for $10 delivery credit.


Reading and information consumption productivity
Pocket
Easy to use mobile apps and webpage views, can archive and favorite, tag at ease. Light weight, fast yet powerful. Bonus: smart reading features like Recommended Reading, Long Read vs Short Read Classification
Financial Management Productivity
BillGuard
I'm still testing this one out but so far I like  it's lighter weight than minted, I can use Credit Cards only features. Swipe and fast archive, action, labeling features. Quickly check if bills are reasonable. Automated smart engine tells you if others have flagged a particular transaction.

From the news
Fast Company Recaps the best apps of 2013
Fast Company Work Smart section












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Command line basics

When jumped on a developer project, I realized that command line is absolutely essential and will be used every other seconds. There are the modern ones : Rails command line, Heroku command line, Git, SVN, even though Command Line tools are old~~ for us newly minted developers. For one business co-founder, she wasn't even sure what it is (understandable of course).

For beginners, I will say: it's hard to learn, old, and less GUI (not graphically rich and friendly for beginners). You have to watch out for several things.

This is a growing list of cautions, tips and notes for beginners, especially beginner rails developers!

• In rails development you often have to use "sudo" to do super user things. But that's not so good. Most professionals don't like using super user power very much. That can break things. In fact, beginners need to be very careful with command lines.
• remove commands, rm, especially with force -f or recursive -r can be especially destructive, use caution 
• 127.0.0.1 is an IP address that refers to the local computer

Console Debug - Rails Server Error

Tried to start http://0.0.0.0:3000 then keep getting into the website that I was working on with a startup rather than my own Rails app. Also got this error message


`initialize': Address already in use - bind(2) (Errno::EADDRINUSE) Sometimes this happens if you already have a Rails Server running. 

You can start the server at a new port

rails s -p=3001
Or just kill all the ruby processes
killall ruby Source: Stack Overflow
You can also use command line to find all the processes that are running
lsof|grep 3000 lsof | grep -i ruby
Turns out in my case it was more than that. A helpful developer changed my /etc/hosts file to change the localhost alias around, so it's actually unrelated to the Rails stuff. So i have to use
sudo nano /etc/hosts To view this file:

And because this is in the /etc/ directory we need to be very careful not to change these mission critical directories without knowing what we are doing.

Codecademy now an essential tool for beginners

Did you know that Codecademy was down yesterday? It surely will be obvious if you are a beginner using the tool. A few girls at the Javascript study groups already told me that they weren't able to get their meeting going due to the outage.

A friend who tried a new tool was dissatisfied and quickly missed Codecademy. The funny thing was, she wasn't even a fan before. The outage (which unfortunately erased a few progress marks, and is currently being worked on by the Codecademy team for restoration) has somehow showed her just how important this tool is.

 Cheers to those yet to discover just how carefully designed the lessons are in this website. And one reason we loved it? It helped so many of us who didn't like reading tutorial books get started on coding. I still receive tweets on a daily basis about working moms, business practitioners, just everyday people learning how to code with Codecademy. Happy thoughts.

[Updated Feb 17]
For those affected by the outage, unfortunately some efforts are lost. As Codecademy does not charge a penny, and has gained quite a user base, it is hard for users like me to get mad beyond submitting a ranting support ticket. Codecademy supplied the apologies through multiple popups, but it wasn't enough, data was still lost. In the true spirit of #gamification - an element of the site - a 404 error badge was distributed to those affected! (super cute indeed) And it was promised that this will be a rare badge (reading between the lines : we are sorry and it won't happen very often, hence rare badge)