Hakitzu | Kuato Studios

cclarke:

Awesome game to help teach kids and even adults to code in JavaScript. Check it out.

gpessia:

Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash helps you store snippets of code, as well as instantly search and browse documentation for almost any API you might use (for a full list, see the screenshots). Dash is not free, you will have to purchase Dash using an In-App purchase. Dash is free to download so that you can test Dash out as much as you want, in order to determine if it’s the right tool for you.

I dunno what this is but it sounds interesting. 

rara-rasputin:

fascinating

WE DON’T NEED NO STEENKING BADGES!  

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.  I wonder what this will turn into?

mozillawebmaker:

Open Badges is a new online standard to recognize and verify learning. A digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned. Open Badges take that concept one step further, and allow you to verify your skills, interests and achievements through a credible organization. And because the system is based on an open standard, you can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of your achievements — both online and off. Display your badges wherever you want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning.

Ten things to know about Open Badges:

1. Mozilla Open Badges is not proprietary — it’s free software and an open technical standard. That means any organization can create, issue and verify digital badges, and any user can earn, manage and display these badges all across the web.
2. Open Badges knits your skills together. Whether they’re issued by one organization or many, badges can build upon each other, joining together to tell the full story of your skills and achievement.
3. With Open Badges, every badge is full of information. Each one has important data built in that links back to the issuer, the criteria it was issued under and evidence verifying the credential — a feature unique to Open Badges.
4. Open Badges lets you take your badges everywhere. Users have an easy and comprehensive way to collect their badges in a backpack, and display their skills and achievements on social networking profiles, job sites, their websites and more.
5. Individuals can earn badges from multiple sources, both online and offline, and manage and share them using the Open Badges backpack. Today, we’re launching with the Mozilla backpack — other organizations will be able to use Open Badges to make their own backpacks later this year.
6. Open Badges make it easy to get recognition for the things you learn, both online and off. Open Badges includes a shared standard for recognizing your skills and achievements — and lets you count them towards an education, a job or lifelong learning.
7. Open Badges make it easy to give recognition for the things you teach. Anyone who meets the standards can award badges for skills or learning.
8. Open Badges make it easy to display your verified badges across the web. Earn badges from anywhere, then share them wherever you want—on social networking profiles, job sites or on your website.
9. Open Badges make it easy to verify skills. Employers, organizations and schools can explore the data behind every badge issued using Mozilla Open Badges to verify individuals’ skills and competencies.
10. Open Badges is free, open to anyone to use and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Open Badges is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors, such as NASA, Smithsonian, Intel, the Girl Scouts, and more. The open source model means that improvements made by one partner can benefit everyone, from bug fixes to new features.

Learn more:
http://openbadges.org

danielrt:

code available here.

Wow!  Isn’t this beautiful work?  I’m sure you all remember these puzzles from childhood.  Here’s a version of them generated by the visual programming language Processing, and their creator was nice enough to provide us the source code so we can see how they did it :)

Collection of Technical Newsletters

dustyprogrammer:

Our industry is an extremely fast moving one, and we spend a lot of time driving innovation. Its often hard to look to the right and see what our peers are working on.

As a curator of a newsletter, this is an excellent medium to receive weekly happenings in your industry of choice, without…

Nice long list of newsletters with tips for various programming languages!

Javascript for Cats

So easy your human companion could do it too!

Design, develop & deploy mobile HTML5 apps

Moonshot - Barkley Labs: The Nature of Code

barkleymoonshot:

Daniel Shiffman is probably the most enthusiastic programmer working today. I didn’t know it until I saw his new video series, but the guy has the energy of a toddler on Red Bull.

I’ve really enjoyed his book The Nature of Code so I was really excited to see that he’s creating a companion…

This is VERY interesting!

WHUT?!  This sounds pretty damn cool.  

paulogp:

Codea

Codea for iPad lets you create games and simulations - or just about any visual idea you have. Turn your thoughts into interactive creations that make use of iPad features like Multi-Touch and the accelerometer.

We think Codea is the most beautiful code editor you’ll use, and it’s easy. Codea is designed to let you touch your code. Want to change a number? Just tap and drag it. How about a color, or an image? Tapping will bring up visual editors that let you choose exactly what you want.

Codea is built on the Lua programming language. A simple, elegant language that doesn’t rely too much on symbols — a perfect match for iPad.

Pseudocode: Helps You Write Good Stuff

si-jones:

Pseudocode is an informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm.

It uses the structural conventions of a programming language, but is intended for human reading rather than machine reading. Pseudocode typically omits details that…

Writing what you want to do in “pseudocode”  is really useful, just the way sketching out a chart or graph on a piece of paper before sitting down to the computer is.  Do it!

Processing.js Quick Start

Like the visual programming language Processing but can’t figure out how to embed your sketches in a web page?  Check out Processing.js, which translates your Processing scripts from Java into Javascript.  

Embedding your sketches in a page couldn’t be easier — add just two lines of code and you’re off to the races!  

I’m at Journalism Interactive today, and this is a post with resources mentioned in our session on creating coder/journalists. 

First, The Journalist’s Learn To Code Resource Guide has 100+ free beginner resources.  

The two big ideas I mention in my session are The Three Skills and The Four Tests.  

The Three Skills

The fact is, much of the coding that journalism needs is not rocket science — you don’t need a computer science degree to learn them.  You can pick them up yourself.  You can get a very long way with the following three skills:  

1. Map It.  Learn how to use MapBox and Google Fusion Tables and mesh that with the dataset of your choice. 
2. Scrape It.  Learn how to write simple scripts to extract data from web pages and reformat it into something useful and surprising. 
3. Grab It.  Learn how to write simple scripts to fetch data from the thousands of APIs (many sites, such as The New York Times, or services such as Twitter, have APIs that allow you to write simple scripts to make requests and get data without scraping).  

Here’s a 12 minute presentation I did on those three skills at TedxPoynter.

The most important question you can ask about learning to code is: “Why bother?”  I learned to code because a lot of things really piss me off.  

The Four Tests

There are always lots of projects and startups.  How do you pick one you won’t regret choosing?  Here are my four tests: 

1. What can I do without anyone’s assistance or permission?  If I can’t even get started without lots of money or help, it might be a great project idea, but it’s probably not a great project idea FOR ME.  
2. Everything about something.  The web rewards “narrow comprehensiveness,” or “everything about something.”  A site with a few restaurant reviews is nice; a site with all of them is Yelp.  What will you corner the market on, however small, or for however short a time? 
3. Don’t do anything for free that you wouldn’t do for free indefinitely.   Startups are hard.  If your thought process is, “This will be really hard and unpleasant for awhile but then something magical will happen and it’ll be great and I’ll be rich,” stop right there.  You don’t love it enough.  Find something you really do love. 
4. Relationships first.  I don’t take any job/project/startup if it dents even a minor relationship in a minor way.  My dad lived in an era where someone could work someplace thirty years and get a gold watch.  That era is gone.  Now, companies are like pets: we outlive them.  Your relationships should outlive (and be more valuable to you) than any job, project, or startup.  When it ends, it’s your friends and family who you go back to.  

Here’s a little bit more on The Four Tests.