Keep Calm and Write Code

I got a Chromebook for Christmas and I plan to use it as my main computer to do everything from email to code.

Yesterday, I installed and tried the Chrome Dev Editor. I tried to create a javascript application. I like the embedded web server to run the app and the customizable font size but I miss all the flexibility of Sublime Text.

Today, I built a webpage with rainbow CSS3 gradient for my girlfriend. I learned the gradient syntax. I also tried the Caret and Puresolid IDE editors. Puresolid IDE font size wasn't customizable and too small for my Toshiba Chromebook 2 HD screen. However, I liked the Caret editor power. It is very similar to Sublime Text.

A new year begins and as usual, I've set some objectives. There's one about my career: To become a professional developer. Not to be paid for the code I write. I am already paid for that as my day job. But to act as a professional with ethics and to be knowledgeable on various code-related topics.

Since I finished my bachelor degree and started working full time, I didn't often kept myself updated on new technologies. I did some efforts in 2013 with this blog but various events made me stop updating it. I kept the habit of reading twitter and blogs but stopped writing code as a hobby. In those 7 years, I also developed some non-professional behavior at my workplace because I didn't know what was a professional programmer definition. I'm happy that some people helped me to be aware of those behaviors.

I've read some parts of The Clean Coder book by Robert C. Martin that made me realize what a professional developer really is. Some aspects are easier to implement than others. The part I have to work the most is to spend time to practice outside of my day job. The author suggest to practice half the time you're paid for. That's 20 hours per week! That's huge for me who spend 0 hours on practice. I already feel like I don't have enough time in a week to do all I want and I need to find 20 hours to practice.

Today, I stumbled on a nice blog post from John Resig called Write Code Every Day. He describes the positive and negative changes that happened in his life after nearly 20 weeks of coding every day. This article motivates me to try to do something similar. However, I won't publish all the code and I don't have a minimum time allowed for coding. I'll try to either:

Code something useful (contribution, bug fix...)

Code to learn (patterns, APIs, editors, IDE, tools...)

Code to practice skills (TDD, architecture, patterns, keyboard shortcuts)

More than 3 months passed since my last post here. That's a lot of time! Hopefully, I didn't sit on my couch all this time. I continued to read many interesting person on Twitter, some blogs and articles mainly about Javascript, and general web.

But I didn't code as much as I wanted.

I played a bit with Meteor on Windows. Unfortunately, their Meteorite packages need Git to run. I tried to setup a linux headless virtual machine with a Vagrant file. I didn't understand much an it didn't work well. I dismissed it.

Then, I played a bit with Sails.JS and managed to build a slideshow app controlled by the server. All the clients were switching page at the same moment. This was nice.

Then, I implemented the same slideshow app in Node.JS with Express and Socket.io. The Javascript code was compiled from Typescript written in Sublime Text. This project is ongoing. I learned a lot and I have a lot to learn.

Finally, I decided that I'll spend all my Monday evenings to code. I started last week by trying to code a Google Map that highlights where I do not want to buy a house (near highways and airport, on boulevards...). It was more difficult than expected to locate the type of roads by code.

Today, I wanted to code an AI for Berlin-AI, a programming game made by friends of mine. All I managed to do is to setup some development tools like Git for Windows, Sublime Text 3... Next week I'll begin to code a general Node.JS framework for Berlin-AI and my own AI on top of it.

Some months ago, I discovered NodeJS and tried using it to implement a REST web service that was retrieving and storing data into a MongoDB database. This was hell! The code I ended up with was full of deeply indented callbacks and it was a nightmare to work with. I did create modules and tried my best to avoid nesting callbacks without success.

At that time, I also discovered Meteor and followed them on Twitter.

Today, Meteor twitted a link to a screencast about Fibers library for NodeJS. I really like how the callback style code is simplified using Fibers. Next time I need to do asynchronous work in NodeJS, I'll try Fibers for sure!

I stumbled across The Infinite Jukebox tonight and was reading the FAQ and some blog posts about the technology used to make this piece of software.

I learned the existence of the Web Audio API, a W3C draft standard currently supported by WebKit based browsers like Google Chrome and Apple Safari.

Today, I struggled to write a Tumblr blog post about Tumblr theme modifications I did but Tumblr text editor interpreted the theme tags and messed up my code every time. Thanks to other bloggers for a solution. I used Gist from GitHub and a nice Javascript piece to transform <a> links into displayed Gists when Javascript is enabled in the cient browser.

You can find the simple procedure on this blog:

The theme I use on my blog doesn't display the hashtags I add to my blog posts. Here's how I modified my theme to display them.

This morning, while reading my e-mails, I noticed a discussion thread in a LinkedIn group. The thread title was “How to stay up-to-date with front-end technologies” and was linking to this article : http://uptodate.frontendrescue.org/

This subject is appealing me for some time and it’s the reason why I subscribed to many LinkedIn groups some months ago.

After I read the article, I decided to commit myself with these 3 simple steps:

Read

Code

Blog

First, I will continue to make efforts to read more on my favorite subjects. LinkedIn groups, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, videos, mailing lists… Find interesting sources of information that are fast to read.

Second, I will begin to code more. I think that reading is not enough to really learn new stuff. I will write code, even if it’s not useful and goes to the garbage bin in the end. From today, I will code more!

A little 4 minutes talk I found on Twitter this morning about ruby and Javascript languages weird code lines.