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."