Women Who Code - Unity Game Engine

Kid and I made the field trip into SF for an evening class by Women Who Code. Unity game engine. Tiring but fun.

(Class turned out to be Session #5 of 5. At kid's insistence, we signed up for the next round too. Session #1 of 5 on Sep 17. Once again, an exhausting late-night trek to SF with laptops strapped to our backs. But fun.)

Chipping away in odd moments alone

I've reached 66% percent complete on the Codecademy "HTML and CSS" course. Good to finally break my grumpy mental block about CSS. But Codecademy is frustratingly buggy plus often slow. Gonna look into W3Schools. (Esp if today's bug, which prevents me from accessing my current lesson at all, does not disappear soon.)

Maybe I will try W3Schools Web Building Tutorial, next time.

Women Who Code - Open Source Software

Women Who Code

Kid and I made a field trip to a Open Source event by Women Who Code SF. Mostly it was above our heads, and we were too tired to tackle it with energy, but still it was interesting. I installed Git Bash and Notepad++ on my laptop, got a sense of some Open Source volunteer opportunities, and learned some Git-related words and ideas.

Not sure what you're looking for, but you might check out some of the following if any of it interests you:

• Mozilla has an office here in San Francisco, plus their main HQ down in the South Bay -- not sure where you're coming from -- so you might check out their projects (testing, documentation, web/tutorial development...plus they have good community member development paths).  In the future, I'd love for you to meet Larissa Shapiro, who is based in the SF office and handles Community Management, but I don't think she's coming tomorrow.
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/GNOME_Outreach_Summer2014
• https://oneanddone.mozilla.org/en-US/
• Or following up on your Python, you might check out newcoder.io -- go through these tutorials & if you find any bugs, help improve their tutorials

See you tomorrow,
Katherine

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Other bits of notes from this event:

http://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-SF/events/195850392 -

learning about the tools of open source software - http://openhatch.org/missions/
- browsing through various open source projects
- installing open source software to start using it
- installing the development environment
- downloading & building from source
- identifying issues to work on
- creating tests & patches
- working on an OPW application
- helping others do these things too!

http://newcoder.io/

Code schools / bootcamps

Photo credit: Kimberly Lin, Hackbright Summer 2014 Engineering Fellow​

Kid and I went last night to check out a Hackbright Academy graduation/ Demo Night. It was pretty inspiring-- both the overview of how the ten weeks are run, and all the cool projects the women had built in just ten weeks. (Five weeks to learn Python, five to learn everything else, plus an optional two more for industry networking and job search.)

GitHub Octocat Coder Girl

From the Hackbright website:

Here is what you will learn. Some words you may not understand when you start, but will when you finish:

• Python
• How to build a webapp
• Pair programming
• Git and source control
• Interview skills
• SQL and ORMs
• Regex
• HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX
• Deploying to cloud services such as Heroku or Amazon EC2
• Terminal shells, grep, and other *nix command-line fu
• Computer Science data structures such as linked lists, dictionaries, and trees
• How to work with APIs (such as Google Maps or Twitter)
• Basic networking concepts / how the internet works
• Other programming concepts and tools such as message queues, batch processing, distributed processing, NoSQL, and web sockets

Interesting student project descriptions here.

MIT Gentle Introduction, Session #11 of 11: "Questions and applications"

The end of my experiment with taking an MIT Open Courseware IAP class.

• I did it!
• It was hard
• But very fun
• I learned a lot
• Including that the logistics of carving out time, finding a desk and food, etc was harder than the actual coursework
• I want to do it again (which I think means taking some version of MIT 6.00), but I can't, at least right away: logistics. Need to return my attention to neglected household duties, etc. (But I bought myself a copy of the 6.00 John Guttag textbook as a prize for finishing 6.189)

What next?

• Reading next textbook (Guttag, John. Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python. MIT Press, 2013) in spare moments, plus Python podcasts, etc
• Trying to add networking/contextualizing events to my life, Women Who Code, GDI, study meetups, etc
• Maybe look at doing some of the HMTL/CSS/Javascript track that everyone seems to start with. HTML I know, but CSS and Javascript I have only passing acquaintance with...

Podcast fun

Found a couple of python-related podcasts. Now, with smartphone under my pillow, I can listen to python talk in my sleep :)

• LearnPython .com- Coursera professor Charles Severance (UMich) doing another python-based "computers 101" course
• (Not related to LearnPython.org - Learn Python the Hard Way, another widely used book and course)
• From Python Import Podcast - higher level geek chat
• (I wonder if I can extract MP3s from the MIT 6.00 lectures...)

MIT Gentle Introduction, Session #10 of 11: "More Review"

A Gentle Introduction to Programming Using Python 
Instructor: Sarina Canelake 
MIT Course Number: 6.189 
As Taught In: January IAP 2011

"6.189 Final Project – Tetris! The format for the final project will be as follows: You will pick a partner and work on one computer together. Make sure that you email files to each other so you each have the code you work on! Sit next to each other in lab. There will be an LA assigned to your area who will keep track of your progress and walk you through more difficult sections of the code."

I spent 7.5 hours total (scattered over four days) on the "Final Project", and completed 9 out of the 11 steps. I could not get Step 10 to work, but after a great deal of careful tracing, decided that the troubleshooting needs seemed to lie in tkinter and the supplied graphics module, not in my own struggles with learning to write object-oriented code for the first time. So, I'm deciding that getting Step 10 to work is beyond what can be reasonably expected of me as student at this level. And being an isolated Open Courseware student, I do not have a Lab Assistant to ask for help. I am declaring the Final Project to be "as done as I can make it", and giving myself a Final Project completeness score of 10.5 out of 11, or 95%.

MIT Gentle Introduction, Session #9 of 11: "Review"

Tackle: Project Two, Conway's Game of Life.

OK, that took me seven hours, over four work sessions/days. Most of that was debugging-- some very educational, as I got experience in several things that produce quirky/mysterious errors rather than simple syntax errors. Some errors produced by programming subtleties I "should know" (are lists local variables?), some produced by IDLE quirks (coughs on too many ''' comments), some by what seem to be errors in the materials provided to me (missing library import, resulting in undefined methods). But I did solve them all, step by step, and get the code working. Someday I will be better at understanding at a glance what the code someone hands to me is trying to say/do. But I am good at step by step troubleshooting, even when not having all the info/background.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-189-a-gentle-introduction-to-programming-using-python-january-iap-2011/assignments/MIT6_189IAP11_project2.pdf