Megan Taylor

Indian Chicken

OK, yes, I may occasionally be one of those people who takes pictures of their food. But only when it’s really awesome. Or when I cook it.

The Pastry Box Project | 18 April 2013, baked by Samantha Warren.

My Ideal Twitter Client

I knew that the old-school Adobe Air TweetDeck was on the chopping block, but found out this morning that I have until May 7 to find a new Twitter client.

TweetDeck to be discontinued for Android, iPhone, and AIR on May 7th

I spent 2 hours this morning looking for a replacement, but haven’t found what I want yet. Nothing out there really replicates what TweetDeck does:

I want to the option to post to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously, but also separately. (I don’t actually need my Facebook newsfeed in the client.)
Desktop app. If I wanted to use Twitter in the bloody browser, I would do that.
I want the post box to slide up from the bottom or down from the top, but not overlay the timeline.
I want single column AND multi-column views.
I want the app to take up as little horizontal space as possible: 250-300px wide in single column view is fine.
Keep toolbars and column navigation buttons out of the way.
Autocomplete for usernames.
Retweet options.

I would add cross-platform to the list, but I don’t want to seem greedy. I work on a Mac, use Ubuntu at home, and sometimes I just have to boot into Windows. I would be happy to settle for a different app in each OS if it fulfilled all the other requirements above.

Someone, please tell me my perfect Twitter client is out there.

Get Meetup Groups by Member ID

Use the Meetup API to grab a list of the groups a member belongs to.

Skills: jQuery, API

Volunteering for ScriptEd

For the past few months I’ve been volunteering once a week with ScriptEd, a non-profit organization that offers programming courses to students at schools in low-income communities in New York City. I co-teach 5 students at Harlem Village Academies for 2 -3 hours every Wednesday. So far, we’ve been covering HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

What’s cool about this group of kids is that they are self-selecting (yes, I see how this is also a short-coming, but it’s early days yet). ScriptEd is an after-school activity, rather than part of the normal curriculum, so they are really into learning how to code. They have stuck with it, through exams and SAT prep and baseball games.

This past weekend, ScriptEd had its first student hackathon. We had 11 students from 3 different schools and at least 12 volunteers (I lost track, since more people kept showing up over the course of the day) in addition to the regular teachers. We formed 6 teams, with 2 students and 2 volunteers each.

Our theme was CIRCLE, SQUARE, TRIANGLE. We challenged the students to use their imaginations and create something awesome with these shapes — for example, students might decide to make the shapes bounce to the beat of a song, or have the shapes divide every time the user clicks on a shape.

The results were incredible. I was so impressed with what these kids came up with and were able to build with their rudimentary skills. It was really rewarding to see how excited they were to actually put their skills to use and build something they could show off.

Here are some of the projects our students came up with:

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/harlemshake/shake.html

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/colorblock/block.html

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/memory/memory.html

http://scriptednyc.github.io/Hackathon/blackhole/hole.html

Three WordPress plugin ideas

Because I can’t find any that do exactly what I want…

~~1. A sidebar widget that shows the 5 (or whatever) most recent commits by a user to any GitHub repo.~~ Realized my commit messages are not useful, found a plugin to show a list of repos.

~~2. A sidebar widget that shows the 5 (or whatever) most recent public Gists by a user~~ Found one.

3. A sidebar widget that shows 5 (or whatever) Meetup groups a user belongs to that are either the most active or have upcoming events.

“I finished Codecademy, now what?”

I really like Codecademy about 80% of the time. It’s a good way to learn the syntax and keywords and concepts of a language. But it’s buggy and once you complete a course, there are few pathways to the next level.

I see this question asked on Reddit all the time, in various programming subreddits. The responses are not always kind, and there are a lot of vague “Build something!” responses. But I thought it would be helpful to compile the best ideas here.

PYTHON

Enkaybee: I always recommend Project Euler because it’s free and it presents some real challenges without any guidance. You have to think logically on top of knowing syntax. You have to write efficient code for many of them. Codecademy is the training wheels, Project Euler takes them off.

RojaB: Don’t you even feel prepared to contribute to open source projects like www.whatcanidoformozilla.com? Have you done API things (dunno what those are yet) for Python at codecademey?

AluGeris: I also have recently finished codeacademy’s python track. Completed ‘Rice university’s An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python’ with flying colors. Now I’m into CheckIO challenges. They don’t have a learning course per say, but when I complete a challenge with my weak skills I am able to view other peoples solutions, which gives me an insight on how much easier I could have done something.

FletcherHeisler: See if the practical topics in the 2nd half of my course at RealPython.com might be of interest to you – maybe a good first step toward some of the scientific applications! For crypto and game dev I definitely recommend Sweigart’s two books respectively. For mobile dev (in Python!) you might want to take a look at Kivy. Definitely focus on one, maybe two courses at a time to make sure you’re making progress instead of just distracting yourself, but start with whatever interests you most at the moment!

monoglot: A new intro to Python course is starting this week on Coursera. Focuses on simple game design. https://class.coursera.org/interactivepython-002

johnflim: I heard about this site from a friend. i only just looked at it now, and the second puzzle deals with a cipher. PythonChallenge

eriiccc: Check out udacity.com. They have a bunch of python classes. I’m currently working on building a blog site with python and google App Engine. The guy teaching the class is one of the Reddit cofounders. They also have a class that goes over algorithms taught by Peter Nordvig. Both classes have been great so far.

R3TR0: Edx.org 6.00x. Seriously.

Mtn_Wolf: I say you should go to the DailyProgrammer. Here you can try out tons of different coding challenges. Rule #1 of Coding: Practice Practice Practice. Also! Keep all your programs you make. You will notice that you pick bits and pieces from previous works to build more complicated projects. Happy Coding!

wumsdi: Where do you want to go with programming? As a general advice I’d say: Learn more about data and computer science: Take a look at courses at Udacity.com, for example; read more about python http://pythonbooks.revolunet.com/) – and practice a lot (sites like http://codingbat.com/python are good for repeating – although the python part here is a bit short). Have fun!

303me: “Head First Programming.” It uses Python as the language and introduces you to basic concepts in programming, making a GUI, using libraries, etc. NOT to be confused with “Head First Python,” which isn’t as good of a book.

Cfattie: Well, if you’re into coding games, I would suggest “Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python”. I’m not sure how much of it is overlap from Codeacademy, but I guess you could skip the stuff you don’t know. I started with Learn Python the Hard Way but I switched to this because it tells you most everything you need to know to understand the program, and then gives you the program to copy and learn from.

kgleeson: Check out http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ Its a pretty basic course, but it gets you to do a lot of interesting things.

Jon-Targaryen: I’d recommend that you switch right away to the latest version of Python, Python 3. You should be able to pick up on the differences very quickly (as far as usage goes, it’s mostly just minor syntax). Non-Programmer’s Tutorial for Python 3 is a good wikibook tutorial.

cheifing: As someone who is also learning python, I would recommend: http://www.learnpythonthehardway.org/ Since you already know a bit about python, you’ll go through the beginning chapters very fast, but the later ones get interesting. The author also checks the comments very often, answering any questions you may have. If that seems to advanced for you, or if it gets too hard, I would recommend this book. This book is great if python is your first language, and goes through everything in detail. It also teaches you some of the general programming lingo.

herefortheawws: I would try the flask (flaskr) or django tutorial, or another framework. That way you will actually move to putting things online, and it will gradually make more and more sense, and it will be easier to transition to making your own web apps (if that’s something you want to do). IMHO, there’s only so long coding practice is useful until you need to learn how to put it all together.

IronPhysco: The other comments suggesting that you should tackle a personal project are good, and I definitely suggest you do that as well to become more familiar with using python in practical applications. It’s difficult to find tutorials for practical code exercises outside of academia, so if you can think of some small utilities like:

grab a webpage from a given url and download all images
write an image-to-ascii program (and the corresponding ascii-to-image converter)

or possibly a game (and smart AI) such as

tic-tac-toe
connect-4
a program that can play battleship against you or itself (and can draw the board on the terminal)

you’ll learn a lot from analyzing the task itself, and from getting stuck on a certain function and looking up ways to improve your approach.

However, you do mention not knowing much about intermediate subjects of programming. If you wish to take a deeper approach to learning the why-does-this-work side of programming via Python, I suggest you dive through this text written by my CS professor. The Art and Craft of Programming: Python Edition. He starts from the basics and works his way up to data structures (something I don’t think was covered in your linked text) and operations on 2D arrays (matrices). You’ll learn a lot from the data structure sections, specifically why some structures are better than others in certain cases, and when you should use them.

I would also recommend looking into “Big O Notation” for more advanced theory into algorithm complexity, something which I cannot stress enough how useful an understanding of this is for writing quick and efficient code. A good summary/example for beginners can be found here: A Beginner’s Guide to Big O Notation. Using this knowledge with an understanding of different data structures can keep your future programs from stalling unnecessarily when operating on a collection of data.

JAVASCRIPT

pandu13: Try learning JQUERY. A javascript framework.

d0gsbody: The sidebar here has a pretty great list of resources, especially if you check the Mozilla link. (As you quest forward, google, stackoverflow, and mozilla dev network will become your best friends).

Start working your way through Eloquent JavaScript. When you can’t understand 3 paragraphs in a row, start googling for answers.

Get the tampermonkey (chrome) or greasemonkey (firefox) plugins for your browser. Start writing Greasemonkey scripts for your favorite webpages. Post them to userscripts.org.

Start using developer tools. Use the console in your browser. Set up a github account and start pushing your better code to it (like your greasemonkey scripts). If you’re not already using a text editor, download Sublime Text 2.

I know you said you don’t want to do a bunch text, but, just so you understand how your jQuery actually works and are equipped going forward: Go to projecteuler.net. Start solving these (this will force you to learn a lot of syntax and to thing algorithmically, which pays off in spades). Write pseudo-code solutions and then actually code them up in JavaScript. Push these to GitHub.

Be active in this community and others. Learn from collective intelligence. Post your questions!

Most importantly, just don’t stop coding. Your knowledge will snowball.

EvanHahn: I made JSTypes and Fiesta.js to learn JavaScript in depth. In order to learn Ruby on Rails, I’m currently working on a site that allows you to meet up with other Super Smash Brothers players in your area. I’ve a bunch more things I’ve made on my website, if you’re curious, and most of them were terribly educational.

IncipLTN : I hear The Definitive Guide is more of a reference book and not as good for beginners. I’d instead suggest Javascript: The Good Parts, but my first suggestion would definitely be Professional Javascript for Web Developers. Eloquent Javascript is another very good option, but it doesn’t go quite as in depth as those two books. I personally did a whole mishmash between the three and somehow came out okay, but I’d definitely suggest sticking with Professional Javascript. But really, your next step should be making something. Anything that interests you. Node.js piqued my interest, so I picked up Smashing Node and I’ve now built a decent IRC Client and I’m half way through building an IRC server.

d0gsbody: Join my study group: http://www.reddit.com/r/learnjavascript/comments/1bombd/announcing_the_how_to_learn_js_properly_study/

If you just finished Codecademy, make sure you do the Discover DevTools course in the next week (it’s linked in my study group post). It’s OK if you don’t understand the whole video, just try to burn through it and know how to open the console that codecademy never taught you about, though you used console commands quite a bit (“console.log”). The study group is going to incorporate a decent amount of jQuery.

PHP

krues8dr: Time to learn a framework or two. Picking up Symfony or Laravel will help you out dramatically from here.

Project Idea

After dealing with movers, cable guys, couch guys, wall building guys, and every other service guy imaginable, I had an idea for a side project for you. Also, this may exist already, haven’t looked yet. But it’s a site where you plug in what the service was, how much it cost, how long it took, how happy you were, variables like that, and it spits back out how much to tip the service guys. I don’t know if data like this even exists but it would be very HANDY (get it? ;) ) Just food for thought.

h/t Ezra

Visualizing Farmers Markets in NYC

<Stream of Consciousness>

Problem: GrowNYC does not have an at-a-glance visualization of what farmers market are open and where they are.

Solutions: Calendar and map visualizations, to answer both “What’s open now” and “What’s open near me.”

Implementation: I’ve never worked with .ical files before, but I would imagine you could scrape the data off the GrowNYC site and run a script to format it to be added to Google Calendar or whatever. I’m more interested in the map visualization. I’ve done some work with KML and GIS before, so I know it would be possible to scrape the data off the site and build a map with different icons showing year-round, open and closed markets.

Sub-Problem: I know how to scrape a single page of data, but have no idea how to go about scraping a series of static pages.

Solution: Google that!

I would like to scrape the data into a Google Spreadsheet, this would enable a lot of versatility and less maintenance (maybe?). Then set the scraper up to run once a week or so to update the spreadsheet. Spreadsheet could easily be used as the basis for both maps and calendars of various types.

Data needed: Each market’s location, active days of the week and hours, special closed days?, location, special events occurring?.

List of markets

Each market then has a page of its own (which contains the data needed!) like so:

97th St Greenmarket

Technologies:
Probably could all be done with Python. Use Beautiful Soup for scraping? How to get scraping results into Google Spreadsheet then? Google Spreadsheets also has a scraping language, I think. Could try to figure that out.

</Stream of Consciousness>

Yes, this is actually the way I thought this through on the way to work this morning.

MOOC Updates

My first instinct was to include the code for each course with my weekly update, but I’ve seen a lot of comments in the forums of most of these classes requesting that we not publish answers. So I’m just gonna go over what gets covered each week and my observations on MOOCs and the differences in each course.

Computing for Data Analysis:

Dropping this for now. I know R is very useful for data analysis, but I’ve made it 3/4 through the course without really learning ANYTHING, even though I’m getting perfect scores on the quizzes and assignments. The class is just going too fast for me to grasp the concepts without devoting a lot more time than I have now. Note to self: Come back to R at some point.

Learn to Program: The Fundamentals:

This week was all about string operations: comparisons, substrings, len(), string methods, dir(str), indexing, slicing, and for loops over str. Also covered accumulators and IDLE’s debugger. Quiz was fairly easy, run things in IDLE, play with str.find. The assignment was fun and just hard enough to be interesting.

An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python:

Really good lectures. And the RPSLS exercise was fun. But I still don’t understand modulo. Especially with negative numbers.

Introduction to Statistics:

Although the accent is sometimes hard to understand, I’m really enjoying this one. Slow enough that I can follow, interesting examples.

The Mechanical MOOC: A Gentle Introduction to Python:

Got an email containing the first week’s worth of work on Monday. This MOOC is different from the others; instead of a self-contained curriculum, they have chosen parts of existing platforms. For example, this week we needed to read some sections from How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, watch a lecture from MIT’s Introduction to Computer Science, do some exercises in Codecademy’s Python course, and work through exercises from MIT’s A Gentle Introduction to Computer Science.

Some info about the platforms:

I’ll be honest: I did the reading and watched the lectures and I did the Codecademy units, but I only looked over the other exercises. I’ve been working on learning Python for over a year, starting with Learn Python the Hard Way, and I’m taking two other Python classes, so I don’t feel the need to go through types and operators all over again this week.