The Novelty

So we've been talking about this asteroid defense game for a few weeks and the idea of using procedurally generated spaceships came up last week, so Luke built this as a first pass.

And now he and Nick are probably going to use it in a game they're building, but everything they do is open source under the MIT license, so we can still use it anyway.

Topics of conversation tonight included:

• The Book and The Novelty
• Fold-It
• Procedural Art
• The Legend of Zelda CSS
• NP Hard problems
• Sending text messages with Python
• Games and Money
• Physics Homework
• Kerbal Space Program
• Hyperlight Drifter
• Kickstarter
• Spine
• Olduvai Syndrome
• World-Building

The Magnificent Seven

1 Thing you Hate
A 2 Word Name that Applies to You
3 Skills you sort of have
4 Awesome places
Your 5 Word Catch Phrase
Your 6 Word Autobiography
And 7 Things you're in to

Philanthropic Web Design

Moving the Dev Club back to it's native land of weekends proper is great. Topics of conversation this week included;

• National Day of Civic Hacking
• Dev Club App Jam
• HTML & CSS & Design Philanthropy 
• Project Euler
• Calculation, and Omniscience
• Kaggle
• Relational Databases
• Microsoft Access & The Value of Good Tutorials
• Joins
• News Site APIs
• Headaches and the Wunderground
• Lexponential
• Ballistics Calculations and MatLab

Next time we'll do some philanthropic web design: HTML and CSS for a beautiful cause with an ugly website.

P.S.
I'm so sorry I went on about the Fermi Paradox, when what I should have been talking about was Dark Matter, Bostrom's Simulated Universe conjecture, and the importance of minding your base when doing binary arithmetic.

Six Fingered Miracles

Topics:

• Super Happy Augusta
• Regular Expressions
• Project Euler
• Lexponential
• The Iron Yard
• Google Glass
• XKCD
• Six-Fingered Miracles
• The Richest Man in Babylon
• 6 hour app jam- when?

The fact that you're actually making something, birthing a new thing into the world, is incredibly important and beautiful. It doesn't matter if the edges aren't straight or the angles aren't 90 degrees. It doesn't matter if your baby has six fingers. It's still a miracle.

Monday's Meetings

• Bitcoin
• Ripple
• Cyprus
• Django
• Generative Art
• The Clock of the Long Now
• Git
• Command-Line Tools
• Open Government
• Stars, Exobiology, and Mass Spectrometry
• Codecademy

First Monday!

This was our first Monday afternoon meeting at The Clubhouse! Topics of conversation included:

• The MVC design pattern
• Django (Python MVC)
• BitCoin 
• HTML
• Javascript (with a real live-coding tutorial)
• Loops
• Variables
• Arrays
• Functions
• The Hackathon!
• Rosie
• GitHub
• Angry Birds
• Turing Completeness
• Girls Who Code
• The Clockface cafe!

Next time (April 15th at 5) Zach has agreed to share some Django Fu with everyone, so if you're interested in learning a little Python (the language Django is written in) before then consider perhaps the Codecademy Python track - I'm ankle deep into it already and the water's fine.

BTW Django is what Pintrest and Instagram are both built on top of.

Happy Coding!

Glassbox: Uber Duper Simulator

On Sidewalks

Topics of conversation included:

• Crafty Js and Game Closure
• ORM and the terror of writing raw SQL queries
• Shame and Git
• Sidewalks* and Agile Education
• Non-English programming languages
• Codecademy and the incredible speed of informal education reform
• The changing criteria of employment selection (HT +Chris Zietlow )
• D3.js and websockets and JQuery
• The LOGO interpreter
• Javascript libraries and JSDB (HT +Chris Harrison)
• Markov Chains
• Flask the Python micro framework
• Drupal and content management systems
• Raphael (javascript animations)

*On the way to the Clubhouse we passed someone walking down the side of Riverwatch parkway. There's no sidewalk there, and despite the fact that walking down the side of a road with no sidewalk is totally legal and allowed, I know what that guy must've felt like, I know the feeling of being out of place. A sidewalk is a piece of architecture that says "you belong here. You have permission. This can be your place" 

The Dev Club is a cultural sidewalk.

The Clubhouse is a piece of architecture that says, "Hey, I know that at work, you don't want to say that you don't know what a decorator method is or in class that you don't know what a matrix is really supposed to represent. I know that it's hard to say I'm lost. I know." say the sidewalks, "and it's going to be okay. There's no rush. There's no pressure. We can learn this stuff together. This can be your place."

Logos ex Machina

This Saturday we have to pick a logo for the Dev Club, so Jake and I were talking about the possibility of writing a little app to design logos for us. It seemed appropriate.

So I built a rough little thing that would combine our name with this orbital-iron-manish-circle-graph, and set a bunch of the variables to random values.

and it made these:

Hooray for Programming!

Wouldn't it be nice.

Codecademy

Jake passed this awesome link to Codecademy, one (of the best) of a new breed of educational sites built just for us! (or at least it seems that way)

My goal with the dev club was to create an environment where learning to program is easier and more fun. Codecademy is a bizarrely perfect tool for that, and I can't wait to see what everyone does with it!

The Clubhouse!

Last night was fantastic! We met for the first time at The Clubhouse, and even had Fred, one of the founders, come to chat about what it's like to be a real live developer. 

Instead of doing the normal "topics of conversation list - I built a visualization for it while we were there. 

Fred showed off the Clubhouse's 3D printer. We finally had a great big screen to hook up to, so we're not all crowded around one person's machine, and we had way more seating and tablespace than my living room ever provided. The Clubhouse is great, and our little Dev Club is all the better for it.

For next time: Show and Tell! What are you working on? A game? Digital Art? Computation Physics? Bring whatever project is your beast or beauty of the day and show it off! The Dev Club is a cheering crowd and a place to share, and if we're not encouraging each other on the rocky road of learning to program, then we're doing it wrong.

But so far...we doing it really really right.

See everybody in 2 weeks!

Growing Fireball!

Tonight was fantastic! Topics of conversation included:

• The Clubhouse
• Baby Namerater & the importance of obvious interface
• Wireshark
• Ubuntu
• Cygwin the command line and Git
• The Basics of Hacking and Penetration Testing
• Dwarf Fauxtress 
• Kinematics and computational physics
• Druid and ecology simulations
• Banks and budgets and https
• NASA Rover Competitions

Not to count any chickens before they're hatched, but - it looks like we'll be moving our bi-monthly meetings to The Clubhouse! I'll be in touch with everyone over the next week or so to smooth out the details. Until then: happy coding!

The Clubhouse!

IS AMAZING!

Three of us went to check out the newborn hackerspace on Broad Street tonight, and OMG you guys: they have a 3d printer, they have nerds, they have robots!

These are our people.

I'll fill in some details tomorrow night at Dev Club, but for now:

• One of the founders beat Waterloo and UPenn at a NASA rover challenge
• There's a small 3D printer for club use
• Membership costs $100/month
• $50 for Military
• $50 for Students
• You get 24/7 access and a key
• You get a free pass to ALL their classes
• They're holding a competition for coolest Leap Motion app (the winner gets 3 months of membership free)
• They're hosting a TEDx next January
• It seems like most of the people there spent some time on the west coast
• They're only 2 months old
• They host several tech clubs already

Holidays Hiatus Has Hended!

Topics of conversation tonight included:

• Augusta's Hackerspace - theclubhou.se
• Tor & onion routing
• Ira Glass and creative growth
• Dwarf Fortress
• Django 
• The rigors of CS 101
• Kaggle, expertise and data science
• The Sacred Second Movers
• Quirky & The Level
• CSS & the zen garden
• Algorithmic Narratives and Story.js

Near the end we crowded around a single machine and hackety-hacked on our Compromise project. Development is about more than for loops and logical architecture, it's about making things that people love to use, and sometimes - like tonight - that looks like good design and CSS.

The next time we meet will be a show-and-tell night! Everyone's going to bring a little programming project - computational physics homework or a game prototype or "Hello World" in C# - whatever it is is great: we're here to be supportive, and to help each other through this struggle of an education.

Happy code everybody!