11 ms·

It's a little hard to tell from your question where exactly your problem lies. If you've done codeacademy I assume you've already got some coding skills. You

by tgflynn 13y ago

It's a little hard to tell from your question where exactly your problem lies. If you've done codeacademy I assume you've already got some coding skills. You say you don't know how to apply those skills to doing something useful. I would start with an idea for something you want to do. You have an ecommerce site so I'm guessing you have some ideas for improvements you'd like to make to that site. I would start with one of those ideas (hopefully a reasonably simple one at first) then try to figure out how you would code that. Implement your change (in a development/test environment, not on your live site), do some testing and when you're satisfied your code is working push the changes out to your live site. I'm not exactly sure what your hangup is about "production ready" code. As others have said there's no special magic that separates "production ready" code from any other code other than testing and reviewing your code to make sure you're following security best practices (which should be pretty easy with today's environments, the frameworks typically provide you with simple methods to sanitize inputs and prevent things like SQL injection). If you were building a site from scratch you'd have other things to worry about, like password handling and secure credit card processing but since you already have a site I don't think you'll need to deal with those more sensitive areas at first. If you'd like to a have a professional spend a few hours reviewing your code before it goes live that's a service I can offer you. My website is in my HN profile and contact info is available there. Feel free to email me if you're interested.

gotrecruit 13y ago
yes, i do believe that i'm not an absolute and complete beginner, but if there is a theoretical 100% expert on programming, i'd say i'm maybe a 5% at most. i've taken classes in college related to programming but not ACTUALLY programming (for instance, excel VBA programming, and another freshman programming class which did not actually teach in-depth programming but introduced me to the basic principles) and i've also done codecademy and in fact finished all the php and python classes but i have no idea how to actually translate the stuff i learned into actually writing something useful. for instance, my e-commerce site is based on joomla and i tried to read tutorials on how to develop for joomla and i got absolutely nowhere. i don't know which IDE to use, i want to implement a daily deals feature on my site but i have no idea where to start, etc. when i say "production ready" code, what i meant was i want to be able to confidently list on my resume that i can write code that can be shipped, and to be able to actually legitimately apply for developer jobs. right now, the best i can do is finish codecademy exercises, which is not good enough. thank you so much for your offer, and i might just take you up on it! you guys are so generous and nice here, frankly i'm quite touched and inspired to start right now.
- tgflynn 13y ago
  Ah, it sounds like what's happening is this: joomla is a large piece of complex PHP code and you don't know how to figure out how to integrate the changes you want to make into it. Also there may be a lot of code in the framework that looks strange and you're having trouble figuring out how it works. I've never worked with joomla myself, but I'll try to give you a few ideas about how I would approach figuring it out if I had no clue and the documentation wasn't helpful. The steps I would take are: 1) Get a local test instance of your site setup. 2) Figure out how to insert a line of code that generates some sort of output that you can see as soon as it's executed (ie. a "print statement"). Usually this will go to some server log file. There should be something in the docs, hopefully an example, about logging. 3) Make a guess about what code gets executed when a page you're interested in gets rendered. Most likely this will be the php file that you see in that page's URL. 4) Once you've got a first message to print out try to reason through the control flow of the code, adding print statements here and there to test your understanding of what gets executed when. By following this approach you should start to get a feel for how the joomla code works and eventually you will find out where code for your new feature should go. If you still have trouble figuring that out try to find a similar feature already implemented in joomla or some add-on or extension and see how that was implemented. If you want a recommendation for an IDE I've found that Eclipse with the PHP plugin works pretty well, but for this process of understanding the joomla code I would just use whatever text editor you're comfortable with, an IDE will probably only get in the way of your investigations at this point.

by tgflynn 13y ago

gotrecruit 13y ago

yes, i do believe that i'm not an absolute and complete beginner, but if there is a theoretical 100% expert on programming, i'd say i'm maybe a 5% at most. i've taken classes in college related to programming but not ACTUALLY programming (for instance, excel VBA programming, and another freshman programming class which did not actually teach in-depth programming but introduced me to the basic principles) and i've also done codecademy and in fact finished all the php and python classes but i have no idea how to actually translate the stuff i learned into actually writing something useful. for instance, my e-commerce site is based on joomla and i tried to read tutorials on how to develop for joomla and i got absolutely nowhere. i don't know which IDE to use, i want to implement a daily deals feature on my site but i have no idea where to start, etc. when i say "production ready" code, what i meant was i want to be able to confidently list on my resume that i can write code that can be shipped, and to be able to actually legitimately apply for developer jobs. right now, the best i can do is finish codecademy exercises, which is not good enough. thank you so much for your offer, and i might just take you up on it! you guys are so generous and nice here, frankly i'm quite touched and inspired to start right now.

tgflynn 13y ago
Ah, it sounds like what's happening is this: joomla is a large piece of complex PHP code and you don't know how to figure out how to integrate the changes you want to make into it. Also there may be a lot of code in the framework that looks strange and you're having trouble figuring out how it works. I've never worked with joomla myself, but I'll try to give you a few ideas about how I would approach figuring it out if I had no clue and the documentation wasn't helpful. The steps I would take are: 1) Get a local test instance of your site setup. 2) Figure out how to insert a line of code that generates some sort of output that you can see as soon as it's executed (ie. a "print statement"). Usually this will go to some server log file. There should be something in the docs, hopefully an example, about logging. 3) Make a guess about what code gets executed when a page you're interested in gets rendered. Most likely this will be the php file that you see in that page's URL. 4) Once you've got a first message to print out try to reason through the control flow of the code, adding print statements here and there to test your understanding of what gets executed when. By following this approach you should start to get a feel for how the joomla code works and eventually you will find out where code for your new feature should go. If you still have trouble figuring that out try to find a similar feature already implemented in joomla or some add-on or extension and see how that was implemented. If you want a recommendation for an IDE I've found that Eclipse with the PHP plugin works pretty well, but for this process of understanding the joomla code I would just use whatever text editor you're comfortable with, an IDE will probably only get in the way of your investigations at this point.