On the road again

Learning web development, one day at a time.

[myownutopia]

All of these sites — some years old, some built recently — and hundreds more like them, eschew the templated, user-friendly interfaces that have long been the industry’s best practice. Instead they’re built on imperfect, hand-coded HTML and take their design cues from ’90s graphics. The name of this school, if you could call it that, is “Web brutalism” — and there’s no question that much of the recent interest stems from the work of Pascal Deville.

The hottest trend in Web design is making intentionally ugly, difficult sites - The Washington Post

[badsciencejokes]

Hmm

[asapscience]

–__– [Via reikacanja]

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Frances Spence

Frances Spence was born on March 2, 1922 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Spence was one of the programmers of ENIAC, the first programmable, all-electronic computer. These six women were its first programmers, and had no courses or manuals for how to operate the computer. Spence and Kathleen Antonelli led the teams that operated the Differential Analyzer to calculate ballistics equations.

Frances Spence died in 2012 at the age of 90.

[biorhythmist]

[myownutopia]

Riding rails, riding ruby

Just spent ages trying to get Rails set up for an online course I’m taking. I refused to use an online development environment, thinking it would be best if I get it set up on my machine first. Well, I struggled for about three days, but I’ve now been able to replicate the happy “You’re riding on rails!” message. Yes!

For posterity, here is what I did (this is Rails 5.0.0.1 and Ruby 2.3.0p0):

rails new myApp --database=postgresql

cd myApp

bin/rails db:create

bin/rails db:migrate

rails server

Happy days :)

[complex-systems-science]

The code that took America to the moon was just published to GitHub, and it’s like a 1960s time capsule When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it. Source: http://ift.tt/29tKP0N

[dataandme]

A meta-review: ““The Art of Computer Programming” by Donald Knuth” by @tashian https://t.co/ZK0X6oKIXb #compsci https://t.co/2zCBVmIKSl

[myownutopia]

Hippity Hoppity

I’ve started down the rabbit trail of pursuing a new path towards learning web development. Having graduated an arts degree for my Bachelor’s degree and education for my Master’s, how could I not be curious about this new venture? 

Most of this process seems to be littered with wrong turns and personal opinions about the best set-up, and having come into this with only a basic understanding of HTML and CSS I’m equal parts seduced by these tips and thinking that I’m above starting from the bottom yet again. How many times do I have to be reminded what an h1 tag is before I can move on to the next part? Unfortunately judging from what the next step is in online tutorials you go from nought to sixty in the span of a day so maybe from the process of one step forward, two steps back, we’ll get there.

Here’s where I wished I started:

Learn the command line, and then learn git. 

The command line will get you around your computer no matter what you’re doing, and you’re going to need it for everything. It’s less scary than it looks. If you use linux like me, this will be your holy text. Dip your toes in and feel like you’re casting spells by running the $ cal command.

Next, learn git and git hub. I wish I had started here and still feel like I’m playing catch-up. It’s such an amazing resource and full of tutorials and files you can actually sink your teeth into, and you’ll learn much faster than just by slogging away at video tutorials (like me!). Good resources I’ve found are Git-It and Udacity’s How to Use Git and GitHub.

Until next time.