Tag Archives: Coding

Attending GitHub Satellite 2017

23 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in Development, Open Source, Programming, Raspberry Pi, STEM, Tools

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Yesterday I attended GitHub Satellite 2017 in LondonGithub

https://github.com/blog/2313-join-us-for-github-satellite-2017-may-22-23-in-london-uk

The event was well attended and there was a good buzz around the conference. GitHub Marketplace was launched at the conference and some of the initial vendors in the Marketplace demonstrated how their applications can be used in the lifecycle of coding. You could watch demos and chat to the companies at their vendor stalls to gain further information.

Below are my notes from the conference and Key Note opening speeches

Opening

The opening lead by Chris Wanstrath (Co-Founder & CEO, GitHub) and Kyle Daigle (Senior Engineering Manager, GitHub)

  • GitHub has 21 Million Developers
  • 59 Million Projects using the platform.
  • Expanding into gaming with Githib for Unity
  • Extentions for Visual Studio

ATOM

  • Help guide the approach with ATOM
  • 2.1 million active users of ATOM

Electron

  • GitHub desktop GUI new version based on electron. Open Source to allow it to be developed by community.
  • Electron platform for building desktop apps. Runs cross platforms.
  • Companies using electron to build internal apps.
  • Seeing big fortune 500 companies using electron for web, mobile and desktop apps.

GitHub as a platorm

  • Now 9 years old.
  • Today more API traffic than UI traffic
  • 5+ million users use integration
  • OAuth growing doubling each year
  • API ‘s have not been developed and remained static….. 9 years old.

World moving to a new world of API’s. Moving on from SOAP to REST to what’s next.What is the future of API’s:

GraphQL

  • Build queries on data you need.
    • Powering new features of GitHub
    • Suggested reviewers
    • Projects
    • Topics
  • 125 million GraphSQL internal queries a day.
  • GraphQL is open source.

GitHub Apps

  • Fine grain permissions
  • Choose how you want to give access to repositories
  • Using bots in Integrations

GitHub Marketplace (Launching today)

  • Find tools that meet your workflows best.
  • Pricing plans in marketplace
  • Marketplace has option to join and apply to be part of Marketplace.

Build and Grow Sessions

There were a number of sessions held in either the Build or Grow track which attendees could join.

I went to sessions in both tracks including the session on Building Interconnected Workflows which featured companies in the newly launched Market Place. Heard from these companies on how their products could be used in conjunction for a full code project lifecycle, which was interesting and good to hear.

Vitor Monteiro, GitHub
Andrew Homeyer, Waffle.io
Danielle Tomlinson, CircleCI
Jaime Jorge, Codacy
Cory Virok, Rollbar

There was a good session on Women in IT from Amy Dickens from the University of Nottingham which also covered topics of diversity and how workplaces and attitudes can change to make a difference.

Closing Session

The closing session was run by Marc Scott from the Raspberry PI Foundation who gave an overview of the Foundation, what it does and how the community can help review projects and sumbit projects for others to practice, learn from and enjoy. Also helping by joining local coding groups to pass on knowledge.

Sessions were streamed and Im hoping that replays are availble to catch up with the sessions I couldnt get to.

Unfortunately I could not get to todays workshop sessions but again hoping for streams of these following the event.

How you can begin to Code

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Programming, STEM, Tools

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code1With all the recent STEM activities I have been involved with and blogged about, I have been asked to write some posts around how someone can start learning to code.

The school curriculum covers an element of coding with some subjects and pupils may be lucky to get a BBC Micro:bit or Raspberry Pi, however you don’t have to wait until school before learning any coding.

You don’t have to be young to start coding either. Using the same methods and tools anyone can learn to code.

The phrase “Learning to code” may strike fear and thoughts of hundreds of lines text and numbers, but it doesn’t need to. There are lots of websites available to help people start to code and present a fresh way of learning to code.

So where to start…….. If your reading this blog then you have access to a computing device. All you need to get started is a computing device with a web browser and access to the internet.

At this stage, its not worth getting hung up on the choices of the many different languages out there such as Python, Java, C etc, but concentrating on some fundamentals of coding.

Depending if you like Minecraft, Star Wars, Dr Who or Frozen, you can learn basic commands through gaming and interaction. These games teach you some basics of coding and commands by getting you to move a character on a screen to complete a number of tasks. Each of the games work in a similar way, using someones favorite characters to help them learn. These also help keep focus and attention.

The first code that you will learn is through blocks.

Minecraft – https://code.org/minecraft

Dr Who – http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/games/doctor-who-game

Frozen – https://studio.code.org/s/frozen/stage/1/puzzle/1

Star Wars – https://code.org/starwars

Moana – http://partners.disney.com/hour-of-code

Once you have completed the tasks in blocks, you could then also try using a different language with some of the games such as Java if you wish. Its a great way of experiencing some of the differences in the languages.

 

 

The main program behind blocks is Scratch. To see more on the block programming method have a look at Scratch itself.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

At the scratch site there are learning tools and lessons to help you learn as well as access to the full programming language. The Scratch site also hosts a lot of other peoples programs which you can run/play and look at how they have constructed their code.

Scratch is a free visual programming language developed by the MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Media Lab.[1] Scratch is used by students, scholars, teachers,and parents to easily create animations, games, etc. It provides a stepping stone to the more advanced world of computer programming. It can also be used for a range of educational and entertainment constructionist purposes from math and science projects, including simulations and visualizations of experiments, recording lectures with animated presentations, to social sciences animated stories, and interactive art and music.[2] Viewing the existing projects available on the Scratch website, or modifying and testing any modification without saving it requires no online registration.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

Scratch allows users to use event-driven programming with multiple active objects called sprites.[1] Sprites can be drawn, as vector or bitmap graphics, from scratch in a simple editor that is part of Scratch, or can be imported from external sources, including webcams.

Source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_(programming_language)

All you need now is to dedicate some time each week to learn to code.

Build 2016 Resources

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Development, IoT, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Security, Tools, Windows

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Following the latest Build 2016 conference Microsoft have new released a number of resources and videos on Channel 9, providing 49 pages of videos and presentations.

Lots of learning available.Code

Programming Nostalgia – Back to the 1980’s

08 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by in Programming, Tools

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As part of the update to the Usborne’s coding books for today’s kids releasing two new books:

Usborne have released some of their 1980 computer books as PDF’s that can be downloaded for personal use.

The released titles include:

Introductions to Programming

Computer Games ListingsSpeccy

Adventure Games

First Computer Library

Definitely a blast from the past. Thank you Usborne for taking me back to my early years! Now where is that emulator software….

Source

http://www.usborne.com/downloads/books/1980s-computer-books/programming-tricks-and-skills.pdf

PI Zero Stock & Project Competition

06 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Development, IoT, Open Source, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Uncategorized

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PISince its launch the Raspberry PI Zero seems to be in high demand with its low price of under £5.00 for the base module. The official suppliers are still out of stock with no view as to when they may receive their next shipment. They fly out as soon as they come in

This makes the PI Zero Stock literally Zero!

The unofficial supply chain of place such as Ebay are now up as high as £42.00 with sellers caching in on what is supposed to be a cheap computing platform.

Hopefully the stock levels will come back to a level to stem/curb the high prices coming in.

But why so popular – this is mainly due to the cheap price of the computing module and has captured the imagination of hackers, developers and hobbyists.

There are a wide range of interesting projects appearing on the net such as:

Hackaday and Adafruit have joined up to create a new competition looking for the best Raspberry PI Zero project.

The platform is ideal for IoT development of small modules, sensors and other projects. The other forms of the Raspberry PI is already being used for IoT projects such as a Home Heating Control Device.

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the competition and the next innovation. One competition I shall be watching with interest.

 

 

Are you rethinking your Java Plugin’s

29 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by in DevOps/OpsDev, Programming, Security

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Oracle have recently announced via a blog post that they are going to deprecate the Java browser plug in JDK9 and remove it from future releases.

By late 2015, many browser vendors have either removed or announced timelines for the removal of standards based plugin support, eliminating the ability to embed Flash, Silverlight, Java and other plugin based technologies.

With modern browser vendors working to restrict and reduce plugin support in their products, developers of applications that rely on the Java browser plugin need to consider alternative options such as migrating from Java Applets (which rely on a browser plugin) to the plugin-free Java Web Start technology.

Oracle plans to deprecate the Java browser plugin in JDK 9. This technology will be removed from the Oracle JDK and JRE in a future Java SE release.

Early Access releases of JDK 9 are available for download and testing at http://jdk9.java.net. More background and information about different migration options can be found in this short whitepaper from Oracle.

Source: https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/entry/moving_to_a_plugin_free

JavaMost browsers are already removing plugin support or don’t support extensions any more. See links below:

Oracle are addressing this through their Java Web Start which downloads the relevant files to your computer if not present then caches them for later use.

Java Web Start is an application-deployment technology that gives you the power to launch full-featured applications with a single click from your Web browser. You can now download and launch applications, such as a complete spreadsheet program or an Internet chat client, without going through complicated installation procedures.

Java Web Start includes the security features of the Java platform, so the integrity of your data and files is never compromised. In addition, Java Web Start technology enables you to use the latest Java SE technology with any browser.

With Java Web Start, you launch applications simply by clicking on a Web page link. If the application is not present on your computer, Java Web Start automatically downloads all necessary files. It then caches the files on your computer so the application is always ready to be relaunched anytime you want—either from an icon on your desktop or from the browser link. And no matter which method you use to launch the application, the most current version of the application is always presented to you.

Source: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/javaws/

However this may not be plain sailing as pointed out in this blog post from Openmicroscopy

What does it mean for desktop developers/administrators?

To deploy Java Web Start, one first needs to get familiar with Deployment Rule Sets. Administrators can then create a list of known-safe applications and manage compatibility between different versions of Java on the system. Each browser will have their own set of dialogs and control mechanisms.

It is getting harder and harder to distribute Java Web Start applications for developers and/or administrators.

Source: http://blog.openmicroscopy.org/tech-issues/future-plans/2015/09/23/java-web-start/

Other useful reads:

NPAPI Plugin Perspectives and the Oracle JRE

 

Easier Markdown with GitHub

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in DevOps/OpsDev, Open Source, Programming

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Github

Its good to see that GitHub has now provided a toolbar to aid in formatting Markdown.

This will help some users from using HTML code format to a word processor GUI type experience. It should appeal to those who are starting out on their coding journey or want an easier life not having to remember if they have included all the <> and </> commands in their files.

Below is an example of a Markdown file that I did as part of a Data Science Coursera Course:  https://github.com/Cloudmage/ExData_Plotting1/blob/master/CodeBook.md

 

Code Book for Project 1 for Exploritory Data Analysis Course – Coursera
=======================================================

## Data Source
* <b>Dataset</b>: <a href=”https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/exdata%2Fdata%2Fhousehold_power_consumption.zip”>Electric power consumption</a> [20Mb]

* <b>Description</b>: Measurements of electric power consumption in
one household with a one-minute sampling rate over a period of almost
4 years. Different electrical quantities and some sub-metering values
are available.

## Data Sets Used

The following descriptions of the 9 variables in the dataset are taken
from
the <a href=”https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Individual+household+electric+power+consumption”>UCI
web site</a>:

<ol>
<li><b>Date</b>: Date in format dd/mm/yyyy </li>
<li><b>Time</b>: Time in format hh:mm:ss </li>
<li><b>Global_active_power</b>: household global minute-averaged active power (in kilowatt) </li>
<li><b>Global_reactive_power</b>: household global minute-averaged reactive power (in kilowatt) </li>
<li><b>Voltage</b>: minute-averaged voltage (in volt) </li>
<li><b>Global_intensity</b>: household global minute-averaged current intensity (in ampere) </li>
<li><b>Sub_metering_1</b>: energy sub-metering No. 1 (in watt-hour of active energy). It corresponds to the kitchen, containing mainly a dishwasher, an oven and a microwave (hot plates are not electric but gas powered). </li>
<li><b>Sub_metering_2</b>: energy sub-metering No. 2 (in watt-hour of active energy). It corresponds to the laundry room, containing a washing-machine, a tumble-drier, a refrigerator and a light. </li>
<li><b>Sub_metering_3</b>: energy sub-metering No. 3 (in watt-hour of active energy). It corresponds to an electric water-heater and an air-conditioner.</li>
</ol>

New Toolbar

 

 

Learning to Program

14 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Development, Programming, Uncategorized

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CodeIf one of your new years resolutions is to learn how to program? If not why should you consider to learn to program and add it to your list? As businesses become more focused on  Cloud, DevOps/OpsDev, aaS (as a Service) or SDnn (Software Defined) a knowledge of programming and a language will help you understand these advancements, services and technologies, as well as allowing you to participate in their delivery.

Here are some good resources to help you:

A good book resource on how to program can be found on Gthub at https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer

The site covers the following topics:

Contents

  1. Beginner
    • Personal Skills
      • Learn to Debug
      • How to Debug by Splitting the Problem Space
      • How to Remove an Error
      • How to Debug Using a Log
      • How to Understand Performance Problems
      • How to Fix Performance Problems
      • How to Optimize Loops
      • How to Deal with I/O Expense
      • How to Manage Memory
      • How to Deal with Intermittent Bugs
      • How to Learn Design Skills
      • How to Conduct Experiments
    • Team Skills
      • Why Estimation is Important
      • How to Estimate Programming Time
      • How to Find Out Information
      • How to Utilize People as Information Sources
      • How to Document Wisely
      • How to Work with Poor Code
      • How to Use Source Code Control
      • How to Unit Test
      • Take Breaks when Stumped
      • How to Recognize When to Go Home
      • How to Deal with Difficult People
  2. Intermediate
    • Personal Skills
      • How to Stay Motivated
      • How to be Widely Trusted
      • How to Tradeoff Time vs. Space
      • How to Stress Test
      • How to Balance Brevity and Abstraction
      • How to Learn New Skills
      • Learn to Type
      • How to Do Integration Testing
      • Communication Languages
      • Heavy Tools
      • How to analyze data
    • Team Skills
      • How to Manage Development Time
      • How to Manage Third-Party Software Risks
      • How to Manage Consultants
      • How to Communicate the Right Amount
      • How to Disagree Honestly and Get Away with It
    • Judgment
      • How to Tradeoff Quality Against Development Time
      • How to Manage Software System Dependence
      • How to Decide if Software is Too Immature
      • How to Make a Buy vs. Build Decision
      • How to Grow Professionally
      • How to Evaluate Interviewees
      • How to Know When to Apply Fancy Computer Science
      • How to Talk to Non-Engineers
  3. Advanced
    • Technological Judgment
      • How to Tell the Hard From the Impossible
      • How to Utilize Embedded Languages
      • Choosing Languages
    • Compromising Wisely
      • How to Fight Schedule Pressure
      • How to Understand the User
      • How to Get a Promotion
    • Serving Your Team
      • How to Develop Talent
      • How to Choose What to Work On
      • How to Get the Most From Your Team-mates
      • How to Divide Problems Up
      • How to Handle Boring Tasks
      • How to Gather Support for a Project
      • How to Grow a System
      • How to Communicate Well
      • How to Tell People Things They Don’t Want to Hear
      • How to Deal with Managerial Myths
      • How to Deal with Organizational Chaos

 

List of useful books on GitHub on programming:

If you are now wondering which language to base your learning on this post may help

There are lots of online courses available to help you learn – alot are free

Q. What does Dr Who and Star Wars have in common? A. Teaching young people to code.

09 Monday Nov 2015

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Earlier this year I wrote a blog post on how the BBC were using their DR Who characters to help teach young people how to code whilst playing a game to get a Dalek through a series of puzzles. Doctor Who: Friendly Dalek teaches you to code

Now Disney and Code.org have joined in, to engage young people to move from playing games to creating games.

This time instead of controlling a Dalek you can control BB8 around some puzzles.

These interactive tutorials will appeal to anyone looking to learn coding and a great way to introduce young people into learning whilst gaming.

There are some similarities between then the two versions and moving a character around the screen. The Dr Who version uses the Characters of the show to explain what you need to do whilst the Star Wars version uses videos of one of the films developers to talk through what the tasks involve.

Screenshot of the interface to control BB8 – source/credit: Code.org/Disney

bb8

Screenshot of the interface to control a Dalek – source/credit: BBC

Dr Who Game Screeshot 1

Which Sci-Fi universe will you choose to help you learn?

All we need now is a Star Trek version…….

Think about what you Git on the Hub

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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GithubGitHub is a popular repository for developers and users to leave copies of code and information that can be shared with others in an Open Source manner.

However as a recent article highlights (1 in 600 Top Websites Dangerously Exposed) some of the data stored in GitHub without any security enabled may expose a business to issues and security risks.

There are two types of repos available on GitHub*

Public repositories are a great choice for getting started! They’re visible to any user on GitHub, so you can benefit from a collaborative community.

Private repositories require a little more setup. They’re only available to you, the repository owner, as well as any collaborators you choose to share with. Private repositories are only available for paid accounts.

It is possible to create a Private Repo for several users. This is not a free option, but is however available at a reasonable cost https://github.com/pricing

You can also implement 2FA for your account for additional security – 2FA Documentation

* Source https://help.github.com/articles/create-a-repo/