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!