Zero to 26,000: My Journey into Open Source with GitHub by Steven Maguire

This was a great presentation by PHP developer Steven Maguire. He talked about his goal to contribute to twelve open source projects in twelve months. He made numerous first pull requests which were rejected, but he kept trying. Once he discovered that there are certain standards and guides to submitting code, his requests started getting accepted. He recommended using trust-markers to validate your code and semantic versioning. He has now had thousands of downloads to his merges to open source projects and was invited to be a member of PHP league.

Link to presentation slides: http://slides.com/stevenmaguire/open-source-journey

Beginner Java Developer Meetup: MIT Course Lesson 6 - Part 2

Today we finished lesson 6 from the MIT course. See links in the below July 12 meetup.

At our next meetup:

We will work on the final lesson #7 from the MIT course.

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

Beginner Java Developer Meetup: MIT Course Lesson 6 - Design, debugging, interfaces

Today we reviewed lesson 6 from the MIT course. Here is a cheat sheet I made that may help with the project:

Graphics Strikes Back Cheat Sheet

Link to the course we are following:

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 will work continue to work on the MIT Lesson 6 assignment Graphics strikes back!

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

Alexa Workshop at Coding Dojo

Another great and free workshop from Coding Dojo. This workshop introduced how to build Alexa skills even without coding skills.

In order to build skills you need an Amazon Web Services account and an Amazon Developer account. Here are the links for each:
https://aws.amazon.com/
https://developer.amazon.com/alexa

Tutorials can be found here:
https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/tutorials/fact-skill-1

Intro to Databases and SQL

This was a nice refresher on databases. I had taken a course in college a few years ago but do not use SQL regularly so this was good practice to brush up on the skills.

We learned about the different kinds of databases which are relational and non-relational. Most databases are relational such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL which stores data in columns and rows. Any other type of storage is considered non-relational such as Mongo. Here is a great website that ranks the most popular databases: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking.

We used a free website to practice running commands with keywords. A few commonly used keywords are SELECT, FROM, WHERE, AND, INNER JOIN and LIKE. There are many others. You can practice here if you are interested: https://www.w3schools.com/sql/trysql.asp?filename=trysql_op_in  There are small diagrams on the W3 schools JOIN pages that better explain these concepts which many in the group found useful. Overall this was a very good presentation. Actualize is offering free courses each Wednesday on a variety of topics related to coding.