Programming Girl Battle Chest - throne : ergoergo

You link to Amazon ErgoErgo supports Programming Girl

This new ergoergo stool is now my throne of choice! Unlike a yoga ball (which didn't work for me :( I can now rock around and enjoy a minor core workout while keeping a healthy spine. I discovered these at the container store! So happy. After I started to learn programming, it was super hard to sit all day long. This does the trick for me.



[The above is a Amazon link, your purchase will help me with my programming quest. I can hence then keep this blog updated with the excitement of Silicon Valley. True to today, I just found this wonderful stool and I am using it :) If you want to request a picture of me :P comment!]

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)

Anatomy of a Hackathon!

I am a geek girl making in progress (You may know me as that Codecademy Girl from Crunchies 2012 and the Venture Beat article about me. ). If you want to support my effort to learn coding please join me here and support my campaign, fundraising: http://www.gofundme.com/programminggirl

You can read about me on VentureBeat and the Crunchies award!
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/codecademy-crunchies/

Currently there are 2 comments and 70+ twitter reactions.

With the support of my first two angel-referees, I attended my very first hackathon. Here's a diagram with it explained. Please note that this is only version one. I will keep updating this.

The grand conclusion is that there are totally beginner friendly hackathons, and it is a lot of fun, despite at times it may be intimidating to be with a roomful of experts.

• People take turns to go up and present their ideas/projects, can optionally form groups/tables
• Work on a group project, spontaneous project, or your very own
• Optional: at times there may be a beginner friendly table, join it to work on a tutorial, get help, ask questions, do whatever you want
• Keep in mind, every hackathon is different, some may have competitions, deadline, no beginner table, etc... I will post different versions of this diagram soon~
• Endless food/drinks. I learnt that unlike writing an essay, coding doesn't flow with alcohol. I quickly switched from one sip of beer to a doubleshot Starbucks. 

In my newsletter to angel-referee fund contributors, I will detailed my findings in newsletters~ The goal is to have something to share with the public but also some perks for the contributors that are exclusive.

Be an Angel or a Referee - help a girl learn how to code

I started a personal "kickstarter" fund to raise money for my programming education. If you are interested in hearing me out, and potentially donate/contribute a small amount to help a "fuzzy" girl learn coding. Please watch my "pitch" here :D
http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/kpb

You can donate with the link below. So far I have raised $90 from three fund angels! One is a consultant,, one senior mobile app developer and another social network app developer. You help means a lot!

http://www.gofundme.com/programminggirl

The money is put into great use and for programming education only. Meanwhile, I will produce visual learning aids from my coding journey to help other learn.

Just this week, I went to my first hackathon ever, I am working on multiple programming courses (which cost money) and multiple free tutorials (use free resources whenever possible): Ruby, jQuery, HTML+CSS, Rails... I am on multiple coding projects concurrently.

One day I studied programming so much that my brain actually aches. Your support matters!

Today I put some first dollars into use to sign up for a $25 monthly subscription program for video tutorials. Meanwhile, I am sweating through multiple coursera and Youtube videos. It is getting hard pretty quickly! I am not just doing web design, but really web programming, so I need to get pretty technical, and start preparing for the intensive 9 week web development bootcamp that is coming right up!

In any case the first $25 is spend but if you sign up for Tree House too, you can learn programming through video tutorials, and that you can help me save money and also give yourself a huge discount by using my referral link. Here you go:





Thank you for helping a beginner programmer in need!

A List of Online Learning and Education Resources

Via List.ly

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Online Education & Learning

View more lists from theoptips op tips

Ruby begins a new day and on my Rails track

After P2PU's atypical start on coding
Codecademy's nuturing
and meeting strange but awesome, non-traditional coding teachers
I have been touched
HTML
CCS
Javascript
Python
Ruby
and
Ruby on Rails


Wow that is quite a bit of Coding Basics. The dim sum bites of my codes have shot up. I will start to post more resources here on this blog. More cultural (including Silicon Valley lifestyle) experiences here:

http://theoptips.wordpress.com

More "Pinterest-like" resources here:
http://snip.it/collections/29996-Coding-for-dummies

Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/theoptips
Git & GitHub explained in simple terms :
http://youtu.be/RHoqdsyL3-U

And as I learn more, I will summarize it here on this blog for non coders.

One very basic coding friend asked me to explain to her in metaphors how the different languages are and how they come together. I synthesized all I have learnt from my developer friends and came up with the following (they are not the best, but they are easier to understand, and it was an important point for her)

Front-end languages deal with more how the websites look, how pretty or interactive they are
- e.g.  HTML, CSS, Javascript
"Midware" Back-end languages connect the front-end view with more of the engines, database, and back-end of a web application
- e.g. PHP, Ruby, Python
- some are more object-oriented (think an Object is like a cube, Objects that are similar to the cube, under the same class may have some similar characteristics, methods or functions that can easily be carried over, making coding simpler), some are script languages like Python which makes doing repeatable tasks easier, really that's what programming languages are meant to be, they can also be more algorithm heavy
Framework
- e.g. Ruby on Rails, Django
- think this as the architectural guideline of how to code with a specific language, e.g. Rails is based on Ruby, that will make things easier
Database languages : allows the front-end to talk to or extract info from the database, create new transaction rows etc...
- SQL
- Rails architecture helps developers avoid dealing with this in too much details.
- MongoDB, not a language per say, more like the new way of storing data like Ruby+Rails, no longer relational (SQL is more relational, think almost a complex form of multiple Excel sheets, but MongoDB is more like MapReduce than otherwise, which is quite quite different from just a relational language)
Git, GitHub
- Git is like version control for codes. Imagine it like a Microsoft Word it saves and stores different versions of your code, and then you can retrieve an earlier version if something goes wrong
-GitHub is social coding, allows you to share your codes online via git push to online format, so that other people can view and build on top of your code

Maybe this isn't metaphoric enough, well then try the Poigant Guide to Ruby, which is completely written in amazing non-sense, but fairly easy to understand. Think it as a terrible yet useful poetry written to explain Ruby. Read it fast. It is quite an insider sensation/joke.

To obtain the book. Google it in PDF, and read it for free. Warning, you have to bear to read a lot of non-sense.

P2PU Challenge Domain Name System

What is a domain name system (DNS)?

How stuff works explains it in a very good graph

I was very confused by the Wikipedia explanation but here's how someone simple minded like me understand it. DNS serves as a host of a "dictionary", this dictionary maps the IP address to a domain name and vice versa to help people locate the correct website.

Here's what I also learnt : 

I registered http://www.mashbean.com

I plan to "hack" it and link it to this blogspot soon. May be later one I will chain it to a WordPress or a personal website regarding my personal portfolio.