Saturday, November 17, 2012
Friday, November 16, 2012
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Meeting: The Fourth
AMAZING PROGRESS!
We started work on our first Meta-Project, an app inspired by Pivotal Tracker that we can use on all our future projects. We call it The Level.
Programming as a nine-person team was kind of like being on the floor of a very small very strange stock exchange - there were triumphs; there was frustration (like when I deleted the stylesheet - I didn't mean to , I swear), and lots of energy, and yelling, and cookies, and a project that went from nothing to something in an hour and a half.
Lessons learned:
The energy of nine people all working together on a project is solid raw grass-fed free range magic.
I can't wait for next time.
We started work on our first Meta-Project, an app inspired by Pivotal Tracker that we can use on all our future projects. We call it The Level.
Programming as a nine-person team was kind of like being on the floor of a very small very strange stock exchange - there were triumphs; there was frustration (like when I deleted the stylesheet - I didn't mean to , I swear), and lots of energy, and yelling, and cookies, and a project that went from nothing to something in an hour and a half.
Lessons learned:
- Cloud Nine - though really great, must be used in a particular way.
- Cloud Nine doesn't always sync multiple simultaneous users well
- It's easy to mistakenly overwrite another person's work
- It's better to split the big team into pairs that share a computer and work on one document together
- Nine is probably close to the limit of how many people can work on one project at the same time
- More seating!
The energy of nine people all working together on a project is solid raw grass-fed free range magic.
I can't wait for next time.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Monday, November 5, 2012
Meeting: The Third
Topics of discussion tonight:
- programming paradigms
- object orientated
- functional
- MVCs
- Ruby on Rails
- Django
- CakePHP
- startup denisity
- online education
- Coursera
- Udacity
- edX
- venture capitol and integrity
- websites
- Unity (the game dev engine)
- Chrome developer tools
- IDE's
- Brett Victor
- The People of the Bit
Near the night's close - after having spent the lions' share of our time trading tips and showing off projects, we realized that only 10 minutes were left on the clock. In those 10 minutes we built the prototype website for Greg's startup (including a little homebrew MVC and a good working example of object-oriented programming in Javascript).
A good night.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Invisible Things Making Noise
The winners are scrappy and don't wait for someone else to hand them their dinner; they run out into the dark and chase down those invisible things making noise.
We are the winners. We're not waiting for a clear picture. We're not waiting for permission or credentials. We're doing it - now. We'll figure it out as we go.
The things we build won't be perfect. They won't be clean. They won't be optimized, but they will BE.
Waiting for perfect will keep us waiting forever. Better to be scrappy.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Meeting: The Second
IT HAS BEGUN!
Tonight we took our first steps into the code: HTML and CSS and Javascript: the beginnings of empire. Because of c9.io we were all able to code together - working on the same document at the same time - so we didn't have to huddle around a single machine while only one person typed. It was great.
Topics of discussion included:
- Lisp: the AI mother tongue
- The basics of web hosting
- HTML (the nouns)
- CSS (the modifiers)
- Javascript (the verbs)
- Bitcoin
- What programming is actually like (lots of documentation tabs)
- Everyone's programming goals for the next year:
- Start a business and publish a few apps
- Build a website
- Learn more about low-level languages (C, Assembly, etc...)
- Build a little RasberryPi robot
- Fix a family-member's eCommerce site
Onward to the edge!
Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Monday, October 8, 2012
Nicole Sullivan: Don't Feed the Trolls
Internal trolls feed on inattention. If you don't want to troll yourself, you actually have to be willing to notice your own behavior.
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Monday, October 1, 2012
The First Time
We didn't code at all - but tonight was fantastic. Topics of discussion included:
- Our individual reasons to take the leap and begin programming
- Project ideas (from games, to democracy, to a variation on the Traveling Salesman problem)
- An introduction to some programming vocabulary
- variables
- arrays
- functions
- booleans
- compiled languages and compilers
- javascript, c, assembly, and python
- turing completeness
- Future format (a loose idea)
- meet on the 1st and 3rd Mondays of every month
- 30 minutes to chat
- 30 to learn something new
- 30 to pair program
- 30 to show off a personal project
- The possibility of building our own tools
- The Map of Javascript
- Cloud 9
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Alvin Toffler
The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn.
Ira Glass: Just Keep Going
It takes a while. It's gonna take you a while. It's normal to take a while, and you just have to fight your way through that. You will be fierce. You will be a warrior.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
No Pressure
We're all starting from the neighborhood of square one. At square N all of us will feel confident starting a business or publishing an app, building solutions to our own problems and solving problems for other people. Between here and there we'll face a ton of challenges, but we'll face them together.
Dev Club is a place for us to learn from one another through pair programming, sharing our little tips over cookies and coffee, short presentations, and app jams a few times a year.
Dev Club is for inspiration and camaraderie It's a school house, and a cheering crowd, and a place to show and tell.
There will be no pop quiz.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)