FreeCodeCamp: People getting their first development job in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. This was interesting to me, I am in my mid 50’s, and it is neat to see people applying themselves to learn programming.
Links for January, 10, 2018
Some good year-in-review posts:
Aaron Parecki: Lots of different IndieWeb projects listed – he’s busy!
Amber Case: Leader in the area of “calm technology” – again, lots of interesting activities.
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!
Links for January 7, 2018
Jon Udell: Annotating Web Audio – this is a very interesting article, I think this is a big opportunity for curation given the great amount of podcasts available today.
Links for January 6, 2017
Linux Journal: Where Do I Start? – a good overview of starting to learn to program in the Linux environment,
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.
Links for January 4, 2017
Some good articles from Jack Crenshaw on how he creates and tests software:
Embedded.com: How I write software
Embedded.com: How I write software – reader feedback
Embedded.com: How I test software
Embedded.com: How I test software again and again
Bonus: How Jack worked on Apollo guidance problems
Links for January 3, 2017
IEEE Computer (PDF): In a February 1995 article, “A Plea for Lean Software”, Niklaus Wirth (inventor of Pascal and Modula-2) laments the size growth in software applications, and calls out time pressure and lack of good design as possible reasons for this growth. In the second half of the article, he discusses his own solution for this problem (Project Oberon) which comprises an operating system, a compiler and a computer. To me, this was a good approach to take from an academic standpoint, but I do not think this had any effect on the mainstream practice of software development (similar in nature to Donald Knuth’s concept of literate programming). A second version of Oberon was released in 2013 (see link below).
Project Oberon – Website linking to Oberon book PDFs and other artifacts
Niklaus Wirth – Home page
Links for January 2, 2018
Some Javascript file handling links:
Writing files:
Eli Grey: Article describing his library FileSave.js
Demo 1: FileSaver.js demo of saving text from a HTML text area
Demo 2: FileSaver.js demo of saving a string in a blob
Github: Source for FileSaver.js
Reading the contents of files:
Treehouse: Several examples of opening files and displaying the contents in a web page
HTML5 Rocks: Multiple examples of opening files
NCZOnline: Code-only examples, no live demos