Code Monkey Adventures

Software Engineer at Buildium and Launch Academy graduate, blogging about coding, robots, game design, and general nerdery.

[forestambassador]

The Score is a game about matchmaking by machinescreen.

Play Online

Why Try It: A quiet, simple game about both the quiet horrors of eugenics and the strange experience of Tindering.

Mood: Creepy / Silly

Author’s Notes: “Tinder in a dystopia”

You Might Also Like: Hot Date, Interruption Junction

[vhsdreamz]

[zzazu]

this photo makes me feel like someone traveled to an alternate dimension and brought back something that shouldnt exist

[forestambassador]

The Faeries’ Curse is a game about restoration by Thomas Flynn and Karolin Schnoor.

Play Online

Why Try It: Charming presentation; simple and quick puzzles.

Mood: Dreamy

Author’s Notes: "The theme for the [Victoria & Albert Museum’s first game] jam was “hidden stories” and we were asked to take inspiration from the V&A’s medieval and renaissance galleries - hence the fairytale theme. We chose to make an interactive website … well because neither of can code much else but it also meant that the game is accessible to the widest audience (although there are inevitably variances in experience due to browser support &c. &c.) We also tried to take into consideration some game accessibility guidelines.

From the forest ambassador: Thomas Flynn also did the soundtrack for the game Chopsquares, a $2 game by Taylor Bai-Woo, whose game Small Armor was previously featured on forest ambassador.”

You can purchase work by Karolin Schnoor at her website.

[sabacc]

THERE’S NOT EVEN ANY WIND INDOORS, HIS COAT JUST DOES THAT OUT OF RESPECT

[sabacc]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier review by Sam H.

[blackgirlnerds]

"out of respect" lol!

[khanacademy]

By: Salman Khan

Join the #YouCanLearnAnything movement

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after...

[yasboogie]

[teachingliteracy]

yasboogie:

7-Year-Old Zora Ball Is the World’s Youngest Game Programmer

The youngest person to create a full version of a mobile application video game. A first grader at Philadelphia’s Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School, she’s already more accomplished than everyone you know.

Ball built the app in the Bootstrap programming language, and unveiled her game at FATE’s “Bootstrap Expo” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Apparently some grumpy olds were suspicious that her older brother was really the mastermind behind the program, but Zora showed them. When asked to reconfigure the app on the spot, Ball showed naysayers what was up when she executed the request perfectly.

“We expect great things from Zora, as her older brother, Trace Ball, is a past STEM Scholar of the Year,” said Harambee Science Teacher Tariq Al-Nasir. No pressure, baby geniuses, but there’s an entire world for you to save. Please hurry.

[ht @Jezebel via @PhillyTrib]

[andyhin]

[txchnologist]

Robot Self-Assembles And Walks

by Michael Keller

Roboticists have developed a flat machine that can fold itself into an operational form and take a walk. 

Built mostly from paper and polystyrene plastic that shrinks into a memorized shape when heated, the robot can assemble in around four minutes. It can crawl at roughly 2 inches per second and make turns. The work by Harvard and MIT engineers represents the first time that a robot has self-assembled and performed a function without humans needing to intervene.  

“Here we created a full electromechanical system that was embedded into one flat sheet,” said Harvard Microrobotics Lab researcher and doctoral student Sam Felton. “Imagine a ream of dozens of robotic satellites sandwiched together so that they could be sent up to space and then assemble themselves remotely once they get there–they could take images, collect data and more.”

Read More

[twicr]

And this isn’t creepy at all!

[allahoffman]

Ruby to C#

As promised, a comparison of the traditional first program in any language (printing the phrase 'Hello, world!' to the console) in Ruby and C#.

Here's Ruby:

puts 'Hello, World!'

Here's C#:

using System; public class Hello1 { public static void Main() { System.Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!"); } }

In C#, the main method is where your whole program begins and ends, and it needs to be contained inside a class (or a struct, apparently, but that is a deeper mystery of C-family languages into which I am not initiated at the moment). System.Console is a class - no prizes for guessing what it does - and the method WriteLine is similarly pretty self-explanatory.

Ruby, well, just does all that for you in one line. For the first time, this inspired me to do some digging under the hood of the Ruby language, and I find that 'puts' is a method of the I/O class, and that it converts all objects passed to it into strings before printing them to the console. They did stress at Launch that EVERYTHING in Ruby is an object, but it's funny that I didn't realize how that might apply to the meta-object that is your program itself. In C#, that's explicit. I had to actually say that I was using the System class, whereas Ruby assumes I'm going to be using the I/O class if I'm using the language at all (admittedly a reasonable assumption).

Given that one of the big advantages compiled languages are supposed to have over interpreted ones is speed, I would do a comparative benchmark, but since I'm doing this all on a Mac (le gasp! But how? Mono works wonders), my impression is that C# will be slower than usual in this context. That's one more difference, by the way - the C# program needs to be compiled before it can be run. 

So, at first glance C# seems to require a lot more overhead than Ruby, without much benefit in the case of simple programs. However, I imagine most people would experience some culture shock switching between languages like these, so I'll try and avoid complaining until I've used C# more. What I will say, is that even just writing Hello World in C# made me think more critically about what the language I'm using is actually doing. 

[allahoffman]

New Job!

I'm excited to say that as of this morning, I am officially going to be joining the Buildium team as a Jr. Software Engineer.

This heralds some big technological changes for me, as I'll primarily be working in C# (!) back in a Windows environment for the first time since...grade school? I've already been taking a look at the language, and think I'll probably keep blogging about the transition from a heavily English-like, interpreted language like Ruby to a compiled, strongly-typed language like C#. Stay tuned for a comparison of 'Hello World's. 

Looking forward to starting work and the challenges ahead!

[zerostatereflex]

[cnce]

Squishy Robots

"A new phase-changing material built from wax and foam developed by researchers at MIT is capable of switching between hard and soft states." MIT researchers are trying to change the paradigm of your typical robot by mimicking organic substances. The idea is that the robot should be soft to conform to a particular environment, and interact with humans, though rigid enough to actually do a procedure. They can achieve this by applying heat at particular points to deform the object, then applying coolness to make the object rigid again. 

"Robots built from this material would be able to operate more like biological systems with applications ranging from difficult search and rescue operations, squeezing through rubble looking for survivors, to deformable surgical robots that could move through the body to reach a particular point without damaging any of the organs or vessels along the way."

via zerostatereflex

[twicr]

Starting a new blog: This Week in Creepy Squishy Robots!

[thoughtbot-tinyrobots]

there will come a night where I start drinking and just wander around my house making fun of all the appliances that don’t have wifi yet

Matt Jankowski, on the proliferation of internet-enabled versions of things (via thoughtbot-tinyrobots)

That-that’s not cool yet? Oops.

[stevekinney]

An Introduction to Ruby Processing

I ran a session at the Turing School for Software and Design a few weeks ago on Ruby Processing (a port of the fantastic Processing programming language to Ruby). These are the notes for that session. If anything is unclear, don’t hesitate to open an issue on Github.

[allahoffman]

I have no idea whether this makes any sense as a tool or not yet, but it combines two things I like an awful lot and therefore is something I need in my life.

[clientsfromhell]

Charles Babbage received funds from the English Treasury between 1823 to 1842 to build his engine. Today, we would know that engine to be more akin to a mechanical computer.

Babbage recorded his interactions with two members of parliament. It went as follows:

On two occasions I have been...

[allahoffman]

Trying to explain the first computers must have been hell.

[allahoffman]

Rails Project Tools Setup

I thought it might be useful to aggregate the tools I put in place now when starting a new project. There are a host of services out there that provide simple, beautiful feedback on how good your code is, if it's working, help you organize your project, and let you display all that nicely on your Github repo. I'm arranging these in order from easiest to integrate to most complicate, though they're all pretty simple. 

Let's start with Waffle.

Waffle is a project management site, very much in the style of Trello, except that it has automatic integration with your Github issues. I find it's interface much more useful for organizing a project than Github's issues, and without the overhead you'd get with Trello, having to enter everything twice. You just sign in to Waffle via Github, tell it which repo you want it to watch, and you can even get it to send you a pull request that, when merged in, will put a badge in your Read Me showing where you are in your project.

Next, Hound. 

Hound is a tool provided by Thoughtbot (and god, do they have some amazing open source stuff available to people) that barks at you every time you violate the Thoughtbot style guide. Once you tell it to watch a repo, when you make a pull request it will comment on the lines that violate the style guide, telling you what to fix. It's a huge pain at first, but it will bootcamp you into writing good code. (Though I'm not sure we'll ever see eye to eye on the single-quotes, double-quotes thing, guys)

After that, Code Climate.

Code Climate is another great tool for making you write clean code, or at least refactor. It grades files individually on things like optimal syntax, complexity of methods, and repetitiveness of code. Like Waffle, it has a badge available (though you have to manually add the markdown) for your Read Me that will update with your 'code GPA'. I highly encourage you to add it, as seeing a low mark up on your repo for all to see definitely makes you more likely to go back and refactor. Code Climate really helped me internalize the principles of DRY and OOD - it helped me see when I needed to get rid of repetition and refactor things out into their own methods and objects.

Then, Travis.

Travis will run your test suite for you, and let you know if your build is passing or not. This requires making some actual (minor!) changes to your project, but it's well worth it so that you can be sure you don't break the build, and don't have to sit there like a bump on a log while your test suite runs.

You'll want to create a .travis.yml file at the root of your app that looks like this.

Now, whenever you issue a pull request you'll see a link to your Travis build in progress, and it will go green if it passes, red if it breaks, or grey if it errors. Once again, you can get a shiny markdown badge for your Read Me.

Finally, Coveralls.

Coveralls will let you know what percentage of your app is covered by tests, and can even show you what lines in what files aren't covered. Once again, you'll have to add a couple of things to your app. 

They're available in a gist here.

You know the drill by now, badge with test coverage is available.

That's all folks! I found many of these cumbersome and annoying at first, but on a project of any scale (or one where you're working with multiple people) they're invaluable. Plus, they let newbie coders get continual feedback on the quality of their work, without needing someone to constantly check it for them.

Hope that helps!

[allahoffman]

Launch Week .... The Last! (Group Project)

So I've fallen behind on the weekly blog posts, in part because we've moved into the final phases of working on group projects and breakable toys. I've gotten an unbelievable amount out of both, and thought I'd write a quick summary of what I did and what I learned on the group project.

First of all, here it is!

We worked in groups of four, and the assignment was to create a review sites of some kind that hit certain technical requirements (basic CRUD, authentication, image uploading with AWS, etc). We chose to review food trucks around the Boston area. Figuring out how to split up tasks while using Git workflow was challenging initially, as in the early stages of a rails app every feature you could implement depends on so many different files in the app that it's almost impossible to avoid merge conflicts. This turned out to be a good thing in some respects, as we got an intensive crash-course in using Git and after a few snags, could work together and separately very smoothly.

Once we had basic CRUD actions working, we split up more ambitious tasks amongst the group. I had the idea of populating our database with data from an API, and found Street Food App. The API was pretty easy to use and has scheduling information available as well, but I was left with the problem of keeping our website up to date without constantly hitting the API with requests. I ended up using Sidekiq to make scheduled asynchronous calls to the API, without slowing down our site or overloading theirs. That was fun to implement, and I ended up writing a lot cleaner code along the way, as I was introduced to the idea of helper objects. 

Testing API integration approved to be a particularly difficult challenge. You run into the same problem as with the regular app, but intensified - how do I test this without overloading the API and bogging down my test suite? I thought the VCR gem's method of recording a successful HTTP call once and playing it back to you after that in the testing suite was pretty clever, but a speaker from Pivotal labs today pointed out that it's not a great way to test how your app handles failed API calls. I originally considered writing a whole separate app that could spoof the actual API, and then having my test make calls to that (which apparently people do sometimes!), but that seemed excessive for our purposes. I'm definitely interested in API integration testing though; it's a problem with so many angles and a lot of potential for efficient, slick solutions.

We implemented a whole slew of features and gems for the first time, from Devise to CarrierWave, and I felt like my ability to build robust, 'real' apps really ballooned. This proved extremely necessary on my breakable toy - let's just say I really appreciate Git and TDD now, in a way I just couldn't working on smaller projects.

[netlibrarian]

[keepcalmandprogram]

This pretty stellar post is from netlibrarian:

"In Dungeons & Dragons, characters are aligned in terms of law/chaos and good/evil. Wikipedia has a great explanation. Technology is a chaotic neutral actor.

Here’s what we’re talking about:

A Chaotic Neutral character is an …

[allahoffman]

Not sure I agree with this (I probably don’t), but I’m morally obligated to reblog things trying to determine technology’s D&D alignment.