Pirate Programming

A blog about my experience learning programming! Contact info: [email protected]

[pirateprogramming]

Hello. I am a high school senior from India. I will be starting my computer science engineering degree in August this year. So I have decided to do a few MOOCs on Coursera, Udacity and EdX. My question is other than an introduction to CS, what other courses should I take to learn programming? I am entirely free for 5 months and hence, I can dedicate 8+ hours every day to learning about computer science. Suggest as many courses as you want but in sequence.

Hey! I actually thought about your question for a couple of days and was going to tell you that the best way to learn programming (and computer science) is to make projects for yourself, like I have. But I saw that you wanted an easy to follow path on what to exactly study and learn, that is trickier to answer. However, just now I saw an article on how self learned programmers should learn computer science that I agreed with. It mentioned specific videos and books to read that I think answer your question beautifully. Here is the link: https://teachyourselfcs.com

[pirateprogramming]

I ended up not writing the paper for the Huffman tree in English. However, in this assignment where we write deterministic push down automatons and implement languages I decided to both write in English and learn Latex (Which everyone keeps saying is required for year 3 in the bachelor’s program.) I ended up really enjoying writing about DPDAs in latex since it is almost like programming or doing HTML (problem solving?). 

Probably I(future me) and a lot of people used to latex will cringe seeing my latex structure and markup tagging, but that is kind of the point of doing this post. Even the point of this entire blog. It is for me and you to see how I have learned and become better at everything coding related. 

Anyway I’ll most likely post about the automatons on Monday or so as well as posting a github repo for the DPDA code. 

[pirateprogramming]

First picture: I finally finished the Huffman compression algorithm!!!! Will upload final version to github @ thisaddress 

Second picture: I wrote a note to my friend when we were sitting in the “quiet zone“-room after finding a terrible “bug” in my decoding function that I worked on finding for at least two hours.

The rest of the assignment is to write a paper on David A. Huffman and his compression algorithm, how I implemented it and how I could improve it. I might post the paper here if it turns out well. I'll warm up on writing the paper by explaining the algorithm to you!

Huffman coding is a compression algorithm that uses the knowledge that some  characters occur more often than others. With this knowledge the algorithm can change how the more frequent characters are represented in bits. For example, the character ‘a’ in ascii is written as 01100001 in binary, but since ‘a’ is more frequent than ‘]‘ in most English literature; We can make ‘a‘ = 0110 in binary instead. If we do this with every character that can be represented by 1 byte (256 characters) we get a different character set where the most common characters can be represented with fewer than 8 bits and the more rare characters with more than 8 bits. We do this by building a binary tree where a left child is 0 and a right child is 1 and a leaf is a character.

This is a super concise probably a bit unclear description of the algorithm but if you are interested in reading more about it, either wait for my paper or go to the following links:

The site I used to learn about how to build my tree.

A blog post that has great pictures describing the process of building the tree.

And, ofcourse wikipedia!

[pirateprogramming]

Where are you getting your college education? I am in the high school level

I am studying for a Bachelor's degree in computer science at Umeå University in a small town in northern Sweden!

[pirateprogramming]

Alright, the app is up and running!

Let me also tell you a bit about version control. What happened was that just before I was going to leave for my grandparents for christmas I was trying to transfer the Password Processor project to my laptop so I could finish the project there. First I tried uploading it to github, but because I had done it before and then deleted the repository on github it did not want to. So instead I copied the project folders to dropbox. Unfortunately android studio did not know how to open the folders from dropbox so I gave up and went to my grandparents.

When I came back home I thought I had overwritten the project by copying it so much back and forth so I decided to take a break from the project until two days ago when I found the java and xml files in my dropbox and decided to finish the project and upload it to google play!

[pirateprogramming]

Uploading Password Processor to play store all over the world! Will post link and write a bit about the process of creating this app tomorrow. I encountered some major setbacks... 

[pirateprogramming]

Working on a new assignment writing a program to compress text files. The algorithm is called Huffman coding and uses binary trees and frequency analysis in a string to make efficient compression. It is very interesting. 

[pirateprogramming]

I wrote a password generator app yesterday and finished it today. It still needs some more work but I am happy with it and will probably use it since seeing a documentary from Sweden about password vulnerabillity. I’ll upload it to google play soon, just need to make sure there is no dangerous bugs.

P.S. You should know that I am not using the passwords in the “Show Passwords” section.

[pirateprogramming]

Drawing maps for me and my friends game, "Hurry Up!". It's going forward and is technically awesome. Will be interesting to see if it will be as fun as I think it is.

[pirateprogramming]

Shoutout to my artist friend (http://harrywistrom.deviantart.com) for making really cool hand drawn graphics for Cannon Astronaut. Only thing missing for the game is a background and maybe some colors on some of the tiles.

Unfortunetly though, Game Maker does not work for linux, and since I switched to ubuntu I can’t work efficiently on Cannon Astronaut anymore. Hopefully I can reuse some of his art for my most recent project, Hurry Up. Make sure to check out Harrys deviant art profile to see the picture that inspired this games theme.

[pirateprogramming]

It’s so great to work together with someone on a game / project as you push each other to finish more and more stuff. For example, when I see that he made a few commits, I feel like I working more, which makes him feel like working more and so on.

The game is getting close to being finished, it’s a very geeky game with logic understanding to be able to play. All that is left is a few levels, making a lobby level and making connections be more logical.

[pirateprogramming]

Here I am back to rectangles and colors with this teaser for my next game.

I am doing it with a friend and it’s looking to be pretty cool! Here is a screenshot that does not look like much but the logic behind it is awesome. It’s inspired by keep talking and nobody explodes.

The drawing was done together too. It really helped visualize how the game should play and look.

[pirateprogramming]

After long hard hours in school I managed to upload my contract, see that it would not return anything as proof of working, copy a contract that would actually return something and uploading it to my testchain. Call its greeting function and kill the contract! I can finally start working on real contracts and trying to get my balance contract to work. Patience is so important when trying to learn something new and unforgiving.

[pirateprogramming]

Switched to ubuntu on my laptop. It looks and runs so much smoother now, and I really like working in the terminal and having more choices on how my system works and looks, not that I have used that power yet. 

Currently I am trying to learn a new language called Solidity used on blockchain technology and a cryptocurrency/Virtual Machine called Ethereum. I have not yet been able to test my contract though as you need to make your own blockchain to test stuff for free. Any of you have advice on a good tutorial that starts from the super basics on how to make a contract and test it on the blockchain?

[pirateprogramming]

I thought my bookshelf looked empty so I added my raspberry pi and wrote a program to display all of my eBooks to fill it up!

This has been an interesting journey. I have learned a bit of vim, I have learned how to control my raspberry pi remotely from my windows computer via the unix command window and putty. I have learned how to use pip, easy_install, --user and sudo a bunch. I learned how to get my raspberry to automatically connect to the wifi after removing the ethernet cable to allow it to be in my bookshelf while I am connected to it via putty.

This has been a good project to say the least.

Here is the gist of it.

[pirateprogramming]

First day of class at university. I wrote "hello world!" In C and started a project to learn CDIO.

[pirateprogramming]

More upgrades and bugs in Cannon Austronaut.

Updatde on school too, 

I got got in to the Computer Science degree. It’s starting august 22nd. So in two weeks I will be a computer scientist!