Just a quickie: If you, too, are learning to code, I strongly recommend following @NatashaTheRobot on Twitter. She posts a consistent stream of links of interest to students of programming. She’s also written a book about how to learn this stuff, How To… Learn To Code. Get Your Dream Job. Change Your Life (which—confession—I bought but haven’t read yet), and she has a fine blog, Natasha The Robot.
Photo: Robbie by Jeff / mr_jeffreed; some rights reserved.
It’s been about a month since I came out of the closet as a desultory Python studier, and I’ve been thinking that I should have included in my plans a commitment to post about what I’m learning, at least once a week. I’ll try to do that, going forward. Less sweeping saga, more this:
I started this blog as a sort of “developer notebook”. If you look back at the first ten or so posts, they are titled “Weekly Noise”. I was interested in learning Node.js (the hotness at the time) so I just wrote about what I learned each week and what I was planning to do next week.
—Matt Swanson, “Do things, write about it,” August 11, 2013 Continue reading How the studying is going
For many months now, I’ve been telling people I’m “learning Python,” when in fact what I’ve been doing, and not nearly often enough, is reading about Python and then not actually doing anything in it. Continue reading More than one way to skin a Python
One of the things I like—a unique feature, as far as I’ve seen—about Kobo’s e-reader software for iPhone OS is that it gives you a choice between vertical scrolling and traditional pagination. Because, really, what do pages mean on a digital reader where the text can reflow according to user preferences? Great. So, I selected vertical scrolling.
Problem is, even if you choose this setting, you will still run into page breaks:
Continue reading The option that wasn’t
Okay! I’ve got basically one month left in which to do my thesis project, so I’m thinking I should try to blog about a little something every day, to force myself to process some of this stuff. Perhaps call it BroTheBloPoMo—Brooklyn Thesis Blog Post Month.
Continue reading Hyphenation in Stanza
The following is the first draft of my thesis proposal, more or less as posted to ITP’s internal project database on Thursday morning. I wrote this in haste and have (still) not had the stomach to reread it, so be hereby forewarned that it may be incoherent, ridiculous, or, of course, both.
Thesis Statement
Every newspaper article on ebooks, in tweet form:
Article: ‘Ebooks might be okay?’
Comments: ‘PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB’
—Liza Daly (@liza), 7:11 PM Dec 15th, 2009
I have been wrestling with the Google Chart API for days, trying to get it to show me a line chart with two freaking lines, but clearly there’s something I’m missing. In the meantime, though, a reasonable portion of Booknik is working, so you can go poke at that.
Continue reading What’s up with the Booknik?
This week’s assignment for Crafting with Data was to “Get to know the normal distribution intimately by building your own quincunx or Galton box. You may use either physical materials or create an imaginative software simulation.” Continue reading Crafting a Quincunx
For this week’s homework in Understanding Networks, our assignment was as follows:
REST assignment. Communication in not-so-realtime. Deliver information to the user through the browser from somewhere else. Update the information they’re seeing while they interact, preferably based on input from multiple sources.
As I mentioned last week, I wanted to work with the newly released Wordnik API. Continue reading Product of a RESTful night
