Tips: Development Servers

• For a quick Python http server, from the terminal type "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" and the directory you're currently in will be served up on localhost:8000 (you can specify another port if you like)
• For a similar simple http server in PHP use "php -S localhost:8000" 
• and if you have XAMPP installed: try "sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start" and the htdocs directory will be your web server's root directory
• A helpful link to download XAMPP

Dev Club Weekly

Conversations:

• Python on the iPad
• Promises: a way to represent something happening in the future (kind of a better way to do callbacks)
• jQuery deferreds aren't promises (but they're kind of similar)
• SpaceX and disposable income
• Heads Up Displays (Like Meta)
• GO IS FUN AND AWESOME!!!
• Governments and Markets and Google PageRank
• Astro Teller and 6 month spikes
• Reg Ex validation of Email
• Don't use regular expressions to parse email - use a parser
• At a certain frequency, putting a human in the loop is the best design pattern
• Docker containers: the successor to HTML and Javascript?
• The virtues of micro-apps
• Distributed systems that follow a semi-linear pattern
• applications that oversee a sort of "assembly line" and let everyone check in on the current status of the process
• (is this a monad?)
• Lessons from teaching a workshop:
• Normalize the environment 
• Start with the finished product and work backwards from there
• Expect very little, include stretch goals
• SOLEs (Self Organized Learning Environments
• Sugata Mitra's TED talk
• Black Mountain SOLE
• Modes of the Brain: Mastery and Exploration

Next week, if conditions are favorable, we may experiment with podcasting Dev Club kind of as a speakers' panel sort of thing. See you then!

Conversations

• The competitive advantage of rapid adolescence
• Ev Williams' theory of the internet
• Douglas Hofstadter: Intelligence and Metaphor
• Paul Graham, the wealth gap and programmer power
• Gabe Newell and the Wizards of tomorrow (Drones and Watchdogs)
• Quora Hack Reactor and Dev Bootcamp
• JTEC and Saudi Arabia
• Phil Rosedale, creating a company without employees, and the Theory of the Firm
• Burger Bots and Watson the the ai-super-chef
• Symfony
• The IMF and property taxes
• Issac Asimov

Conversations

• Backbone JS (plus a great tutorial - thanks Chad!)
• Democracy and Culture
• Mondragon workers' cooperative
• Neural Nets and Google's acquisition of Deep Mind
• The Last Profession
• UserCake PHP
• Slim PHP

Conversations

Phil Rosedale (totally watch this video, it's awesome and changed the way I think about startups and the Bay Area, and a bunch of other things)

The Iron Yard and (at least two) different bootcamp models

Github and Iconic

Working at an established company (Google, Apple, etc...) vs working at a startup

Money and escape velocity

Ludem Dare

SpaceX and reusable rockets (I'm looking at you Chelsea)

Making Graphene in your kitchen

Conversations

• Callbacks
• IIFEs
• Scope
• Eloquent Javascript
• Soylent
• Colony California

Conversations

• If Hemingway wrote Javascript (totally worth the read)
• An extended intro to Functional Programming: Reduce and the subspecies of Map (Filter, Pluck, etc...)
• Tony Hsieh (Zappos founder) and the Downtown Project
• Falsey values in Javascript (undefined, null, NaN, false, 0, "")
• Philip Rosedale and getting a job in San Francisco
• Memory Games

Conversations

• The Jedi and the Sith: personality and programming
• Ira Glass and sticking with the hard things
• Python debugging with pdb (wow probably increased my python productivity by 4%)
• The persistent superior qualities of paper
• To-Do lists and Google Glass
• Pivotal Tracker, Slack, and Taskqueue

Dev Club Weekly: Haskell Edition

This week we spent the bulk of our time experimenting with Haskell, trying to get the 7 Ingredients (see below) nailed down. We set up a Github repo with examples of the 7 Ingredients in several languages (so far Javascript, Python, Ruby, and soon PHP and Haskell). If you're even half-interested in contributing, fork the repo and play around (C# maybe? or Java?).

Next week Chad (thank you Chad) is making Dev Club into a Meetup event, so invite all your techie friends! Conversations:

• The 7 Ingredients  (you need to know to start programming in any language)
  1. how to set a variable (basic data types: numbers, strings, booleans)
  2. conditionals (if else statements, control flow)
  3. sets (this could be arrays, or lists, or hash maps or tuples, depending on the language)
  4. loops
  5. functions
  6. where to find the documentation
  7. how to actually execute your code
• Haskell
  • There seem to be no variables, just function calls
  • everything is an expression
  • space delineated expressions (instead of curly braces, for example)

See y'all next week!

Conversations

• React JS
• Pitching to VCs and Angel Investors
• Starbound and Wild Star and EQ Landmark and Player-generated content
• Event listeners and the fickle unstable merciless DOM

Conversations

• Mars and Patents and the Singularity
• Taskqueue
• Pitching to VCs and Angel Investors
  • Single person companies with no demo can still be in the $1M valuation range
  • A large local VC invests 6-20% equity in their companies
  • It seems to be easier than we thought to get funded
• Canon Culture
• Chad's Glass App
• Workflow (New Directories are Cool)
  • Method heuristics (4 lines Sandy Metz!? Really!?)
  • Scaffolding
  • Checklists
• Jaguars and Wolves 

Conversations

The value of values (totally worth the watch, also these [simple made easy] [datomic] [deconstructing the database] [approaching refactoring]

Docker and Sandboxing

Intro level JS and Python

• Fizz Buzz
• iPython notebooks and the JS console and the importance of documentation

Recursion

Aubrey de Grey and kludge as the Alzheimer's of a codebase

Dev Bootcamps

One of the two codecademy creators learned JS by building codecademy. (video)

Conversations

Entering the flow state with a 9 volt battery. (radiolab episode)

Companies where everybody knows everybody else's salary (planet money podcast)

Conversations

The Myo armband and becoming a wizard

The current legality of Drones

Handheld Spectrum analyzers

Languages that Compile to Javascript

Relational Databases and Document Stores

Docker and Sandboxing and Dokku

How ES6 classes are like the DMV

Fair Warning

Over the next few days I'll be posting items of note from our conversation during the days of the mailing list, so a few of the references may be a bit dated.

Dev Club Weekly: At the University

THE SPACE AT GRU IS PERFECT!!! 

We had a great big projector! An entire wall of whiteboard! More seating that 5 of my living rooms! Next week Chad (thank you Chad) is making Dev Club into a Meetup event, so invite all your techie friends! Conversations:

• FRED'S SUPER AWESOME UPCOMING DJANGO WORKSHOP!
  • July 19, 10 am to 4 pm. 
  • $120 - cash. unmarked bills. or - preferably - Bitcoin*.
  • Lunch is catered from Jimmy Johns, Brunch is catered too (donuts and bagels and coffee)
  • Prerequisites: first 2 chapters of Learn Python the Hard Way
• The value of being the complete package: design, front-end engineering and back-end engineering (in a nutshell, it lets you attach a problem at any level of the stack, and means you never have to wait on somebody else). As a corollary: Amory Luvins and Saul Griffith.
• The Lab and the Factory
• Money: what it is
• TCP
• Google PageRank**
• John Kleinberg
• SHA1
• The 6 magic things (you need to know to start programming in any language)
  • how to set a variable (basic data types: numbers, strings, booleans)
  • conditionals (if else statements, control flow)
  • sets (this could be arrays, or lists, or hash maps or tuples, depending on the language)
  • loops
  • functions
  • where to find the documentation
• Tesla Motors and The Oatmeal

See y'all next week!

*just kidding, checks are cool, pay early or pay there.
**and my suspicion that some country or other will realize soon that the free market is PageRank without a buffer...

Back to the Light of Day

Last year I decided to move our weekly Dev Club debrief off the open web into an email newsletter. I think there were some benefits to this, but now I realize that having a public ledger of our years-long conversation has so much value that I did the community a disservice by moving away from it.

I repent.

Starting tonight the Dev Club blog will return with weekly updates to our conversations and experiments.

May we walk long in the light.