Itty-Bitty: This app (link to Github) encodes a web page in the URL. I have not figured out how this works yet, but would like to….

Test-Driven Development with Python: Book on using TDD for Django development (there is a link to read online for free!), Selenium is used for browser testing.

Trevord Miller: Staying up-to-date as a software developer with a daily learning routine – Learn new things (uses a feed reader), solidify through practice, remember through spaced repetition.

Using app from Jon Udell to annotate web audio

I linked to a Jon Udell post on Sunday where he describes his recent experiments on annotating audio files available on the Web. It looked so good that I had to try it to annotate a podcast!

His app is at http://jonudell.net/av/audio.html. I then needed to find a URL to a MP3 file, which took a little bit of searching, since a lot of podcast play pages are not a direct link. Finally, I settled on an extended cut episode of Side Hustle School. I hovered over the “Listen Here” link for episode 12 and saw that it was a link to a MP3 file. I copied the link address and pasted it into the url text box in the Jon Udell app. Next, I entered a start time and stop time for the clip (from 1:00 to 2:00) in the selection boxes on the app page, then clicked the button “Play clip”. The app then started at 1 minute in and played for 1 minute – excellent! Finally, I clicked on the link at the bottom where it says “link to av editor with these settings” to get a URL for my clip. Now you can listen to it as well!

Thanks Jon!

How to get started (in programming)

I linked to an article on Linux Journal Saturday discussing how to get started in programming. I think this is a good article for several reasons, one of which is picking a skill to learn and getting started. For me, picking a small thing to create or learn, getting some success and getting that working, helps me to get enthusiastic. I am then ready to pick up a new thing. This is the process I am using to learn the Tone.js Javascript music library. I worked through some of the code examples, then came up with a small project, broke it down into a set of steps, and I am working through them one at a time. Success!

How to help on a open source project

Kyle Mathews posted a list of ways to help on an open source project, and then followed up with another two items. One of the items (write as full a description of the problem as you can) is especially important to me. I usually try to follow the steps of this Dave Winer post on writing good bug reports. The more information there is on a problem, the easier it is to solve.

Philip Greenspun: Teaching Young Americans How to Be Code Monkeys

Can creating software be like cooking?

I am experimenting with posting to my 1999 blog, so I will be cross-linking to those posts here. Check out “Can creating software be like cooking?“, which compares learning software with learning how to cook.

Learning something new can be hard

Even though I have been working in software development for over 30 years, it can still be hard to learn new things. You start on a tutorial, then find you have the wrong version of something, then discover that you need to install a development kit, only to find that there is still something not working. Sigh…

Example 1: I spent some time playing with RSS Cloud recently. I was trying to access the RSS Cloud server from my shared hosting webhost, but I was unsuccessful. I was able to access it from a second cloud server. Eventually, I found out that I could not access ports above 1000 from my shared hosting. Ugh.

Example 2: I was trying to export some old WordPress websites and render them as static websites using Jekyll. However, I could not use one of the standard converters because I did not have a Ruby development kit installed. I then tried several others and finally worked around this, but I am still not there yet. Ugh ugh.

Example 3: I have recently been following the work of Melody Kramer and the 18F team at the GSA. I thought I would take a shot a cloning a repo from their Github site and trying to rebuild the repo using Jekyll, but ran into a number of tool issues (please note I am not blaming the 18F team!). Ugh ugh ugh.

Takeaways: Nobody ever said software development was easy, sometimes you just have to keep digging…and maybe backing up and taking smaller steps.

Thanks for listening…