bphogan

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by bphogan 16y ago
I figured that my story was the exception. But I just went in to get a new ipad replaced due to a bad rotation switch and I watched as they replaced a macbook that had water on it (they tested it and said they could tell) and they also repl
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by bphogan 16y ago
I'm not making this up. Intern of mine spilled 32oz of soda on his mbp. He dumped as much out of his keyboard as he could but it wouldn't come back on the next day. You're not hiding that from Apple. His machine was on year 3 and had a few
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by bphogan 17y ago
I agree with this completely. I just wanted to add though that had I stayed with Oracle and PHP / Java, I would not know the things I know now, nor would I have had the opportunities that I found because of those. Ruby (the community) has c
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by bphogan 17y ago
Ruby does. Jeweler, Hoe, and other things are scaffolding for Gems. They get you going, but I found that as I relied on them too much I didn't really understand how it works. You can write a gemspec by hand which is what I have done now for
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by bphogan 17y ago
I don't know - I doubt it. I've dealt with situations like this before. The clerk is told by his boss what to say. In this case he probably is not allowed. He phrased it very specifically if you notice. "All I can say is..." It probably is
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by bphogan 17y ago
People who say that Flash is accessible aren't visually impaired. I am. I have not once seen a Flash application that works well enough to be useful in any screenreader I've used. I have been following Adobe's accessibility efforts for year
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by bphogan 17y ago
I don't think you're wrong. But I think we need the examples before we can prove you're right. Nothing prevents anyone from taking this code and building a lab out of it as a secondary method of learning. Of course, you're perfectly free to
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by bphogan 17y ago
We Rubyists tend to put on the wizards hat and wave the wand around. But Ruby can be procedural too, and a lot of times can look a bit like Basic. I like Chris Pine's book "Learn To Program" because it uses Ruby very simply to teach introdu
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by bphogan 17y ago
I think that'd be neat. And even neater if you could explain why you chose Haskell for your example over other languages. One advantage of us doing this as a multilanguage book is we get to show how different languages solve different probl
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by bphogan 17y ago
I think looking at source code is passive. Having to type it in is not. There's something... different about typing it in, learning by doing. We all spend our days copying and pasting. What was neat about the code books was that you couldn
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by bphogan 17y ago
BLock shoots block is just fine for a 4th grader - at least it is for my kid. And I think computers are knowable. Some languages are not, but others are. Ruby has a REPL that's very good as a teaching tool. I've had a lot of luck teaching w
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by bphogan 17y ago
Nothing wrong with that, and it could be a valuable project. With a book, we have more options. We have the code, we can send it out as a web page, we could have it printed as a textbook, we could even build some kind of interactive system
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by bphogan 17y ago
I want to see what we can do though, as an open community. I think there are tons of passionate people that would love to throw something like this together. At least, I sure hope there are.
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by bphogan 17y ago
I was planning to work up a structure once I saw what we ended up with. I'll take whatever we can get for languages. If we end up with a bunch of ruby and a bunch of python, maybe we see if we can get one example of each. Or maybe we just s
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by bphogan 17y ago
I'm hoping to get lots of people interested in helping out. I think this could be a lot of fun and a great way to show how fun programming could be. I enjoy teaching my daughter how to write little games, and I imagine others do too. I miss
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Let's make a "type the code listings" book for kids.(github.com)
39 points by bphogan 17y ago|33 comments
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by bphogan 17y ago
A lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can be for devs. I have students that I mentor building projects with Heroku and Rails, and it'
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by bphogan 17y ago
I would agree with this, but also, snapshots are great. If you goof up your VM, just revert :) Great when learning how Linux works, and much faster than a wipe and rebuild.
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by bphogan 17y ago
Honestly I think there are many benefits to Linux especially if your plan is to work on Python or Ruby development. If you're looking to do C# stuff, Windows is gonna be better. When it comes to a lot of open-source languages, Windows is ki
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by bphogan 17y ago
Ruby certainly can do SQLite3 on Windows, quite well under 1.8.6 and 1.8.7, but as the article's author notes, it's just troublesome under 1.9. (But enough other stuff doesn't work quite right in 1.9 yet either anyway.) The setup for dev on
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by bphogan 17y ago
I'd say yes, but so what? If people want to give students mentors and $5000 to work on summer projects that could ultimately help the Ruby ecosystem overall, that's pretty cool. Everyone benefits. The fact that it's sponsored by the communi
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by bphogan 17y ago
Maybe it goes back to my frustrations with Dreamweaver, but I always felt like an IDE only served two purposes - to prevent developers from really learning a language (autocompletes, intellisense, etc) and making up for poorly designed, ove
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by bphogan 17y ago
I've seen that argument before, and I have to tell you, it's a bit of overdramatization from someone I respect a lot, who should know better. Apple has to sell unlocked Macs, because that's how you develop software for their closed platform
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by bphogan 17y ago
You will. Heroku has three big limitations that can make your app a no-go there. The first is only hourly cron tasks which means doing sweeping every 15 minutes is not possible. Not terrible, but sometimes a showstopper if you're trying to
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by bphogan 17y ago
While this is very cool for producing HTML, I still like HAML and StaticMatic better because it's reproducible. The Zen Coding plugin and this both look like they are just shortcuts, whereas HAML sticks around and gets expanded when I compi
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by bphogan 17y ago
I love Ruby. It's the first language that's made me happy as a programmer. I don't like special characters, and I can tolerate ruby's occasional =>, |e| and {}, and I tend to avoid the other ones. For the same reason, I like Python. La
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by bphogan 17y ago
I worked on a system a couple of years ago where we ran calculations nightly and then we write the results of this calculation to a row in a table for caching purposes. This row was then fetched by another job to generate a PDF. We used SQL
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by bphogan 17y ago
Actually you do lose functionality by going that way. SVN handles binaries better. I can also cherry-pick files from a directory structure, so if I need to fetch out a subfolder or an individual file, I can do so. With Git I must clone the
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by bphogan 17y ago
I agree with this, but I'd add that we developers tend to make an RDBMS do everything because it's what they're familiar with. NoSQL is an alternative to solve a specific problem, but you can't see that problem if you're ignorant of it. It'
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by bphogan 17y ago
Deployment isn't the issue with these - deployment can be automated just as easily as an RDBMS. Sometimes easier. It's trivial to throw up several instances of MongoDB for example. As for hosting solutions that support this stuff, well, I p

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