Uh Oh Programmer

A programmer has quite a few options when having to choose the tool to help him or her code. While it is possible to just use a plain text editor, you can make life a whole lot easier for yourself by using source code editors. What I find very pleasant when using any these editors is the highlighting feature. You can let the editor know what programming language you are coding in and with that information, will highlight accordingly. You can also choose to download extensions to add more features to the editors. Atom My favorite one by far. Free to use. Very customizable Theres a very useful package/plugin that compiles C++ code from the editor menu. Notepad++ Free to use. Been around for a long time. Sublime Text 3 Free trial with no expiration. Pay if you appreciate.

I have previously mentioned that one of the ways to become to a software engineer is through self teaching. We truly do live in the information technology age. You can find all things software related whether it be a single article explaining how to create your first 'hello world' app to a well structured learn-at your-pace online course. A while back when I first caught the bug to start learning development, I ran into a few websites that, as a beginner, proved to be very useful. www.freecodecamp.org freeCodeCamp is a free massive open online course, or MOOC. The focus of the course is front end development. Meaning, the content you will be learning is geared towards those wanting to get into web development. You will learn the trifecta: HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. NOTE: Yes this is different from learning back end work using languages like C++, Java, Python, etc. The takeaway is that you still get practice typing out code and getting a visual result. w

Object Oriented Programming: Part 1 Think of a generic person, place, or thing; any noun if you would. Think of all the details pertaining to this 'object'. What does it look like? Does it have name? What does it do? Those questions and more can be translated into code. The best analogy I have seen to visualize the software design structure known as OOP, is using a car as an example. A car is a class.  A car has a model name, color, fuel type, capacities, etc. These are what would be called class instance variables.  The car also moves forward with the gear in position and the gas pedal pressed. It also can go in reverse and stop when the brakes are pressed. The actions of the car can be described with class methods. Here's a an example of what I just described using C++: #include <iostream> using namespace std; class Car {     private:             string model;             string color;             string fuel;             double fuelCapacity;    

Another episode of The Workstation! Today I'll talk about that one thing you get your hands on the most when your in front of the computer. The keyboard of course! Now if you think they're all the same and it's just a piece of hardware, you couldn't be more wrong. Or you just don't spend that much time working on a computer. When you log in hours upon hours of typing time, you will feel the difference in quality between the keyboards you will come across. Again, what I use isn't that fancy but I've had a $10 keyboard and I've had a $100 keyboard. There is DEFINITELY a difference. Cheap generic general use keyboard vs. Razer Chroma Ornata keyboard (Yes, I know it's an extremely lopsided comparison but it'll help me make my point.) The first thing I notice when I try a keyboard is how well the keys respond to how I type: $10 keyboard: The keys are stiff an feels like I need to jam them to even get a response.  I can't really type as f

Okay, so, your sitting down in class and your mind begins to travel to another dimension. Your professors voice begins to fade and before you know it your in day dream land. In it, you are a hotshot superstar software developer guy/gal with the latest most fantastic idea for an app. Suddenly, you snap out of it as your professor begins to wrap things up and you just jolt out the door. You get home and recollect on your amazing idea. You rush to your room. Then you realize...oh. I need certain things to help materialize  amazing ideas. Just what exactly do you need to start smashing away on that keyboard to software unicorn stardom? Lets talk about your workstation set up.  Let's get on with my first post series: The Workstation. While I will just generally list certain items, I will be elaborating on a few of them in later posts. Hopefully. Also, there would be a bit of a bias in the things I list due to the fact that these are things I have as a personal preference.  1

Bing and Google They are search engines in which a user can look for web, image, video and map contents. They both use crawlers to scan and collect information on websites in order to index them for search. Both have a landing page where one will encounter a single search box centered in the screen. Even their search results page look very familiar. After reading a few articles comparing or promoting either one, I couldn't really tell the actual difference. Just depends on what one would more likely search. I also went and did a side by side comparison by searching the same thing in both search engines at the same time. From what I could tell, Bing seems to be geared towards more mainstream content. For instance, if you were to put a random phrase resembling music lyrics at all, Bing seems to have a higher chance of bringing up a music video in the top results than Google. I entered the phrase "dark horse". Bing brought up Katy Perry and Google brought up Dark

If your looking to find out which websites dominate the big WWW, there's no better place to look than www.alexa.com. It might sound familiar to those who own an Alexa, created by Amazon. They started off as an independently owned company until they were bought out by Amazon in 1996.  The company helps business increase their page rankings and profits through tactics such as SEO. Here are the top 10 websites listed on alexa.com 1.) Google Should  come as no surprise as the internet giant's presence on the web is ominficent. It is the number 1 search engine used by the world. As mentioned in the last post, they dominate the email client space. They too are masters in data collection and targeted advertising. 2. Youtube - Web2.0 Owned by Google, the original vlogging platform is still the popular choice of uploading cute animals playing instruments, among other things of course. You can find videos on a wide range of topics. Youtube can be an excellent learning resour

Gmail is reported to have over 1 billion users. That statistic was back in 2016. Chances are you own a Gmail account and use it as your primary email. Let's look at some fun facts about the world's most favorite used webmail client. 1990's -  The man responsible for the creation of Gmail is a man named Paul Buchheit. As a college student, he was already working on a prototype for a personalized webmail client. 2001 - Buchheit works for Google and is assigned the task to create a personal web based product. He then officially creates the project that will be known to the world as Gmail. So at that time, what was the big deal about Gmail anyway? Hotmail and Yahoo were dominating the market. But not for long, thanks to a scripting language called Javascript and a frame work known as AJAX. Google wanted a more profitable, efficient, user friendly email client. By using Javascript they were able to create a more dynamic web product. Gmail is a stark example of the eme

It was a line of jargon I could not understand. A few words of English mixed in with symbols, typed in some kind of structured writing. An electronic form of poetry in an alien language I thought. With a few inputs into a black screen they call the command prompt, man and machine converse. My friend, a programmer since high school and now working with embedded code for a large tech company, showed me the wonder that is programming. I didn't say so, but it piqued my interest begging the question: how does it work? Witnessing some simple code, that crunched numbers and asked the computer to open and close it's CD drive, pulled at me. I never really cared to learn before, but now that I have chosen to learn and make a career out of it, I will never look back. The world of computer science is as astonishing as it is complex. Before I decided to take the dive into learning the field, I dove into the treasure trove of information that is known as the Internet. I just wanted to