Portfolio Page

Today I finished the basic setup for the portfolio page from Free Code Camp. There will be a lot more content coming to be added, but I am happy with the initial result. Here is the link to check it out: https://codepen.io/jenhurd8/full/pPdpdP/

Girl Develop It - Intro to JavaScript /Parts 1-4

Attended 5/23, 5/25, 5/30, 6/1

The course slides are available online if interested:

 http://gdichicago.com/courses/gdi-featured-js-intro/#/

Girl Develop It - Intro to JavaScript /Part 1

Today, I attended the Girl Develop Intro to JavaScript. It is a four part course with two hours each session. I had taken JavaScript a few years ago in school, but this course is a good refresher. I strongly recommend the GDI courses if you are just starting out learning to code. They are appropriately paced for those just starting out. Also, plenty of guys attend these meetups too!

The course slides are available online: http://gdichicago.com/courses/gdi-featured-js-intro/#/

IJUG Virtual Meetup - Machine Learning Exposed

This was a nice introduction to machine learning. Machine learning is the science of getting machines to learn without being explicitly programmed. The speaker showed several examples. Below are two websites showing machine learning implemented. The first is a picture that is given and the machine must try to match which object it is. The second is a large group of paintings which are sorted based on certain characteristics. There are several ways to give the machine data from which it bases its decisions on. They are supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. Recommendations were given to check Coursera or Stanford courses if you are interested in learning more.

http://cs231n.stanford.edu/

https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/tsnemap/

Beginner Java Developer Meetup

5/17/17

Meetup #7: MIT Lesson 4/Marathon and Library Projects continued

Today we went through and finished the Marathon and Library projects.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-092-introduction-to-programming-in-java-january-iap-2010/

See the code on Github: https://github.com/BeginnerJavaDeveloperMeetup/MIT-assignments

Please send me your Github name if you would like to contribute to our group.

Draw.io file:

https://www.draw.io/#G0B1fYewnAppxuQWdLd3FraXRfMEE

Announcements:

Upcoming Conferences

Chicago Coder Conference:  June 26-27, 2017

That Conference: August 7th - 9th, 2017

If you are on Facebook checkout: Self-Taught Programmers Group

Static you tube video. Why is the main method static?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm5B6Z8roQk

At our next meetup:

We will start working on MIT Lecture 5: Access control, class scope, packages, Java API.

Don't forget to sign up for the next meetup if you plan to attend.

Project Management with Trello

Recently I saw another person learning to code who had saved everything they were learning into a project management webpage. I was impressed by the idea and did a little research. I tried several options and found the one that worked best for me was Trello. https://trello.com/  The only thing I was disappointed in was most of them do not come with a manual time tracking feature. Additionally, the ones that do either cost money or are an add on that others cannot see unless they have it downloaded. I'm not sure if I will keep using this or just keep track of things on this blog, but it's good to know this type of free software exists in case I decide to use it for any upcoming projects.

Here are a few others if you are interested:
http://www.techworld.com/picture-gallery/startups/10-best-free-project-management-software-programs-3625922/

Getting the whole picture...MIT Library Project

So, I have been working on this MIT Library Project assignment #4 for our meetup group at the library.  I was using the same example from MIT Lecture 4 of the baby object to try to build code for the library project. It seemed no matter what order or variables I used to build the code I was getting one error or another. I reviewed the lesson a couple times, I googled objects and compared my code to a bunch of other objects but wasn't getting very far.

So, I took a couple days off and then came back and reattempted the project. I still had the same issues so, I decided to try a different resource. I had purchased a couple old Java books, and found the answer in the 2013 Introduction to Java Programming by Y. Daniel Lang.

The example on the left, is the same code from his book. It wasn't that the code was wrong, it was that I wasn't getting the whole picture. When I compared the circle code to mine, the items were in different order and the brackets and variables were setup differently. All it took was a different perspective, a full page of working code creating an object to help everything make sense. After I found this, I finished the library project in about fifteen minutes and all worked just fine. I realize now that some random bits of code sometimes aren't enough to get the whole picture on how some of the larger ideas work.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-092-introduction-to-programming-in-java-january-iap-2010/assignments/

http://www.cs.armstrong.edu/liang/apcs/html/SimpleCircle.html

Beginner Java Study Group

Meetup #6: MIT Course Lesson 4 - Objects and Classes

Today we went through the Objects and Classes lesson and started working on on the Library project.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-092-introduction-to-programming-in-java-january-iap-2010/

At our next meetup:

We are going to try to correct the Marathon.java file to get the fastest two runners and we are going to try to simplify and complete the Library project. We will also do some work uploading files to Github.

In our existing code we used an arraylist but we had not learned that yet. A point was brought up we may be able to use a fixed array (that we had previously learned) and then make four book objects with a boolean for borrowed status.

I have added the Book and Library files we were working on to Github if you want to try to work on:  https://github.com/BeginnerJavaDeveloperMeetup/MIT-assignments

If you send your username for Github I can add you to the group.

Don't forget to sign up for the next meetup if you plan to attend.

Sololearn

I ran across a recommendation that there was a free beginner course on Sololearn on Java and several other languages. I checked it out and it was a good review and test of what was taught in Head First Java and the Beginner Java for Dummies books, so I am going to add this to the beginner suggested to do list.

It tests you by giving you partial code and you have to fill in the blanks to finish to achieve the desired result. If you have a basic understanding of Java, you probably could finish this in a day. At the end it gives you a nice certificate to show you completed the course. You can add the certificate to your Linked In profile or Facebook. I decided not to add this one since it is lesser known but still a nice achievement and good practice on beginner concepts. https://www.sololearn.com/