#42

CORS is a good idea but goddamn fuck CORS

#43

do you like drupal? Iā€™ve used it a few times, mostly recently yesterday to build a prototype for something. I hate it but thereā€™s must be something in it that Iā€™m missing because quite a few people seem happy with it.

#44

I have a basic understanding of coding, I am considering doing a course in it as my industry seems to be loosing jobs to ā€˜digitalisationā€™ etc at an alarming rate, (along with most industries).

I have two questions:
Is it just hard graft of learning code similar to learning a language?
Have you got any recommendations on how to get started, courses or reading?

#45

Yeah thatā€™s fair enough. Think the most fun I had coding was my final year project in uni which was something I was interested in, or writing scripts for a minecraft server I ran for some friends for a little while

#46

Yeah, but mainly for data analysis. Use matlab, R and python mostly.

Done some stuff with Arduino and processing for fun. Would like to learn something lower level like C++ but donā€™t have a particular project/reason at the moment so will probably never happen!

#47

does optimizing XML count as coding?

I use notepad++ DAILY and yes, I have changed the colours on it to make it look like the Matrix.

#48

I donā€™t particularly like it but I appreciate how much you can do with it. I built a site using it that I ran for a few years and itā€™s got a lot of good stuff in it (this was 12 years ago, TBF so itā€™s evolved since then) but itā€™s a bit of beast to tame. You have to spend a lot of time looking at what to tweak.

I think itā€™s powerful and in terms of what it offers itā€™s one of the best. E.g. Wordpress is great but is actually fairly locked in in terms of user accounts work. This means that you can only really collaborate if you have a new email for each person on the Wordpress blog, so if yourā€™e curating a blog from submissions, you canā€™t actually assign each to a separate user. This is obviously a highly specific requirement but one my mate has always had.

Mainly the issues I had with Drupal were a few little code changes Iā€™d do to achieve features I wanted would need to be done every time the software updated and if you didnā€™t update you were wide open to attacks. This meant that I had examine the new code every time to establish if my little changes would work, meaning it wasnā€™t much easier than building my bespoke site from scratch!

I briefly tried Ruby on Rails for one site but after two years I just converted it back to PHP. The most recent one I built was http://review31.co.uk This is the sort of collaborative thing Iā€™m talking about where I could not get Wordpress to do what I wanted, despite really hoping to.

#49

I did some of the basic levels of those Code Academy free courses a couple of years back when everyone was banging on about how coders were in huge demand and getting paid shit tonnes and I was in a bit of a funk and I thought maybe I can jump on that sweet bandwagon.

Turns out no, I cannot write code.

#50

I do for work. I donā€™t really enjoy it though.

Mainly VBA in Access and Excel
Lots of SQL
SSIS
Sed and awk for Unix
HTML, Asp.net, JavaScript
Dabbled a bit with Coldfusion too

#51

yep same. My VBA is pretty ropey but just about gets the job done
I downloaded R ages ago but not really looked at it, is it good?

#52

I think itā€™s easier than learning a language by some margin. The bits I had trouble with initially were

  1. how the computer would make sense of these english-based words
  2. the examples that were used to teach us the first bits of code, they seemed trivial and useless isolation. It was only when they started to get combined and I guess only when I started writing code for a living that it really fell into place.
#53

https://www.w3schools.com/ is a good place for things like html, sql, javascript etc.

#54

I do TONNES of SQL coding, which for a mathematician is a kind of exquisite pain. On the one hand itā€™s like trying to drive with one finger and your eyes shut, on the other itā€™s like trying to formulate the algebra for quantum mechanics from scratch.

#55

Thanks!

#56

The R community is amazing, I donā€™t think Iā€™ve ever run into a problem that hadnā€™t ready been solved in a stack exchange thread!

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#57

Increasingly rarely worked on a project in C# for work actually quite enjoyed it but unfortunately the project got discontinued

Also wrote some stuff in Ruby as itā€™s used to automate some processes in our cloud environment.

Do VBA at work occasionally

I would add Iā€™m pretty terrible as far as writing well designed code but it generally works.

#58

Iā€™ll throw in my own jaundiced old hack opinion:

If you like and are reasonably good at maths then you will be able to learn to code in anything, all coding languages are fundamentally similar. If you donā€™t or arenā€™t you may be able to learn it, you might get hired to do it, but youā€™re unlikely to ever be good at it or really enjoy it.

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#59

This is a GREAT place to learn Javascript

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

Now JavaScript is in many ways a very very awful language, full of strange little idiosyncrasies and such, but even so, as a consequence of this I think youā€™d also learn a lot of concepts around Object Oriented programming. The lessons are very clever and quite inspirational for notions of things to try and I think itā€™s really well-written.

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#60

None. But then as a mainframe developer it wouldnā€™t really be possible even if I wanted to (which I donā€™t). Iā€™ve also been in the industry for 30 years so itā€™s not as if Iā€™m looking to get my foot on any ladders!

#61

Are you familiar with IBM JCL? Even 20 years down the line the memory of that makes me shudder a bit.