Tag: code

Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg

The Man in the Taupe Blazer

You are an educated, successful person capable of abstract thought. A VP doing an SVP’s job. Your office, appointed with decent furniture and a healthy amount of natural light filtered through vertical blinds, is commensurate with nearly two decades of service to the craft of management.Copper plaques on the wall attest to your various leadership abilities inside and outside the organization: One, the Partner in Innovation Banquet Award 2011, is from the sales team for your support of its 18-month effort to reduce cycle friction—net sales increased 6.5 percent; another, the Civic Guidelight 2008, is for overseeing a volunteer team that repainted a troubled public school top to bottom.

Source: Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg

Can Learning to Knit Help Learning to Code? | MindShift

“Thinking is like cosmic knitting,” Waldorf school founder Rudolph Steiner wrote nearly one hundred years ago. Steiner  developed a comprehensive handwork curriculum for Waldorf students based on this idea, filled with knitting, sewing and woodworking, believing that “a person who is unskillful in his fingers will also be unskillful in his intellect, having less mobile ideas and thoughts.”

Today’s Waldorf students still knit socks and whittle kitchen spoons and many Waldorf schools shun the use of technology. Those two things — handwork and technology — might seem at first glance to be at odds. But there’s a case to be made that handwork and computing  — and the kind of process that links the two — are more closely related than one might think.

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 Can Learning to Knit Help Learning to Code? | MindShift.

Code to Joy: The School for Poetic Computation Opens – NYTimes.com

AUGUST 12, 2013, 11:05 AM By AMY O’LEARY

New computer science graduates jumped by nearly 30 percent last year, and a bevy of professionally oriented programming courses have erupted to teach start-up ready skills like, “How to Build a Mobile App.” So it makes sense that programming is widely considered to be this generation’s “Plastics” — a surefire professional skill that can bring success, security and maybe even stock options.

But fewer people talk about how programming and engineering can be used for pleasure, beauty or surprise.

Now, four people with a variety of backgrounds — in computer science, art, math and design — have banded together in Brooklyn to rethink how programming is taught.

Their school, the School for Poetic Computation, is intended to be more passionate, free-spirited and curiosity-driven than other kinds of private coding schools that have cropped up in the last few years, like New York’s Hacker School which is project-based and paid by start-ups to recruit from their student body, or Seattle’s Code Fellows, which offers practical classes with an aim to get their students a job after graduation.

via Code to Joy: The School for Poetic Computation Opens – NYTimes.com.

How smart developers generate lousy code | ITworld

By Esther Schindler

May 31, 2013, 10:03 AM

Most experienced developers can think of a time when they worked on a team with other accomplished programmers. Yet the code quality was anywhere from “eh” to “oh god you didn’t actually ship that did you?!” Here’s how this can happen, and what to do to minimize the chances it’ll happen to you.

Sarah Mei spoke about a time she worked on a team with really expert developers. Every one of them was someone whom you’d admire, who had previous written code that you and I would boast to have created. Yet, these smart people created modules that didn’t talk to each other. And its quality was, to be kind, on the rotten side.

You’ve probably encountered something like this at some point in your own programming career. Instead of the team creating more than the sum of its parts, the end result looked like something created by a novice developer. If not like crayon sketches from an untalented 6-year-old.

continue reading-  How smart developers generate lousy code | ITworld.

CoderDojo – CoderDojo

CoderDojo is a movement orientated around running free not-for-profit coding clubs and regular sessions for young people.

At a CoderDojo, young people learn how to code, develop websites, apps, programs, games and more. Dojos are set up, run by and taught at by volunteers. Dojos organise tours of technology companies, bring in guest speakers to talk about their career and what they do, and organise events. In addition to learning to code, members meet like minded people, show off what they’ve been working on and so on. CoderDojo makes development and learning to code a fun, sociable, kick ass experience. CoderDojo also puts a strong emphasis on open source and free software, and has a strong network of members and volunteers globally.

CoderDojo has just one rule: “Above All: Be Cool“, bullying, lying, wasting people’s time and so on is uncool.

To join a CoderDojo, please find your nearest one from this list, or help set one up one!

via About – CoderDojo – CoderDojo.

Religion, politics and coding indentation style: the three great debates | ITworld

Forget abortion and gun control; if you want to get programmers arguing at your next party, bring up tabs versus spaces when indenting code

By Phil Johnson

March 05, 2013, 12:15 PM — A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of things that I found most frustrating about being a programmer, back when I was a programmer. One of those things was the size of indentation in code. Somewhere along the line, I was trained (or just started on my own; can’t recall) to set the tab key in my editor to four spaces. That’s what I stuck with for years and got used to seeing. When I read someone else’s code that used two or eight character tabs, I found it annoying. It wasn’t a dogmatic thing for me; I didn’t care that much. Four spaces was just my personal preference.

In the programmer community, though, discussions of coding style such as the size of code indentation can quickly turn into a holy war. Some people tend to have very strong opinions on it. It flared up a little bit in the comments some people made on the article; but there are plenty of lengthier (and more heated) discussions on it elsewhere on the web.

via Religion, politics and coding indentation style: the three great debates | ITworld.