Episode Notes

Welcome to episode 2 of the Programmatic Podcast! On this episode, Michael discusses the following Items.

Challenge 1 – Results

Here are the results for the episode 1 challenge

Swift

// Ask for the user’s name print(“What’s your name?”) let name = readLine()

// Print a personalized greeting message if let name = name { print(“Hello, (name)! Welcome to my program.”) } else { print(“Hello, anonymous user! Welcome to my program.”) }

JavaScript

// Ask for the user’s name const name = prompt(“What’s your name?”);

// Print a personalized greeting message if (name) { console.log(Hello, ” + name + “! Welcome to my program.); } else { console.log(“Hello, anonymous user! Welcome to my program.”); }

Python

number sign Ask for the user’s name name = input(“What’s your name? “) Number sign

Print a personalized greeting message

if name: print(f”Hello, {name}! Welcome to my program.”) else: print(“Hello, anonymous user! Welcome to my program.”)

Resources

Training Courses

• LinkedIn Learning
• Udemy
• CodeCademy
• FreeCodeCamp

YouTube

• Code With Chris
• FireShip
• Paul Hudson
• Sean Allen

Tutorials

• hacking With Swift
• Ray Wenderlich now Kodeco

Providing feedback

Please let me know what you think of the show. Email me at [email protected], or you can find me at https://techopolis.social/@mikedoise on Mastodon. I am also @mikedoise on Twitter

Thanks again for listening, and I hope you will join in the conversation and learn more about programming.

Transcript

Programmatic 2 – Resources

Michael Doise Programmatic

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[0:00] Music.

[0:09] Hi and hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Programmatic. I’m Michael Doeys and we’re here for another episode of the show and it’s great to be back again. Reallyexcited to yet again be doing this podcast with you all. So thanks for tuning in if you’re tuning in in podcasts or on YouTube. It’s good to see you here. You know, we have a a great show lined up for you today. What we’re gonna be talking about today is kind of continuing where we were last time in, and that’s with getting started. And I think one of the biggest things that people have a hard time with is finding resources for getting started with code. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, is how to get your foot in the door, how to get started with programming, and where to begin, what resources you can use to do that, and ways to get involved in the community.

[1:06] And, you know, if, like I’ve said, if folks are in chat, please feel free to say hello on YouTube and we will go from there. So getting started in programming is, you know, kind of difficult. I’ve been programming for a long time. And, you know, whenever I’ve, I started whenever I was, you know, nine or 10, there was, I couldn’t even figure out how to find QuickBasic or QBasic, only found about it by chance. And so, it’s gone a long way from there to, all of these websites that we have, and being able to just Google and use Stack Overflow or ChatGPT. And, so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today is how do you find those resources? This is a good time here to do our first challenge resolution, what’s the solution to the challenge? And we’re going to talk about those in three different languages, typically Swift, JavaScript, and Python.

[2:11] Those are the three languages I work with. If you have a request for language for a solution, let me know and we’ll do that. And so I’m gonna let our good old friends with 11 Labs premium voices us the solutions to the Swift.

[2:54] Curly brace else left curly brace print left parenthesis double quote hello anonymous user Welcome to my program.

[3:05] And now to the JavaScript. Slash slash ask for the user’s name. Cons name equals prompt left parenthesis double quote. What’s your name? Double quote right parenthesis semi colon slash slash print. A personalized greeting message. If left parenthesis name right parenthesis left curly brace console dot log left parenthesis double quote hello double quote plus name plus double quote exclamation mark. Welcome to my program. Double quote right parenthesis, semi colon right curly brace, else left curly brace console dot log. Left parenthesis double quote hello anonymous user, welcome to my program. Double quote right parenthesis, semi colon right curly brace. And now to the Python. Hash. Ask for the user’s name. Name equals input left parenthesis, double quote what’s your name? Double quote right parenthesis hash, print a personalized greeting message. If name colon indent level one, print left parenthesis F double quote, hello left curly brace name, right curly brace exclamation mark. Welcome to my program. Double quote right parenthesis. Else colon indent level one, print left parenthesis double quote, hello anonymous user. Welcome to my program. Double quote, write parenthesis.

[4:27] So, my apologies to folks on YouTube. Those come in at production time. So, they do, they, the voices are not present at runtime. So, or compile time. So, you have to get those at runtime. A little programming humor for the show there. So, thanks for listening. And if you have an idea for a challenge, please feel free to submit that. And we will put that in. And if you have solutions, we will put those on the next episode of the best solutions. So, this is episode two. And today we wanted to, like I was saying before, talk about resources. And we talked about several resources last time. And there are resources that are better than others out there.

[5:25] As I was going through my programming journey, I used one called lynda.com and that became LinkedIn Learning. LinkedIn Learning has changed from lynda.com and I don’t know if it’s for the better or for the worse, but it is what it is. So they have great courses, a lot of their catalog is still the same, a lot of the same teachers.

[5:47] So it’s a good way to get started. They have great classes and tutorials on getting through things. And the cool thing is that they have bite-sized videos. And I just want to stop here and say that none of these platforms sponsor our episodes, so just keep that in mind.

[6:07] So that is, you know, I’m just talking about resources that I’ve used. You know, LinkedIn learning has been a great resource. I just, I personally feel like their courses do not update enough, often enough for some of the things that I would like to see. So it’s a good way to get started, good way to learn a new language, but I feel like YouTube and places like that are going to be where you go to get current content. And the reason why that’s important is for things like UIKit, which is great to learn for iOS. That is a monolith. It has been there for ages. It was there since the ancient times. It will be there. So LinkedIn Learning is a great resource for that. Whereas something like SwiftUI or maybe Jetpack Compose for Android, that may be a little more of a long-term that may be there now. So that might not be as much of an issue whereas like SwiftUI came around in 2019 and there’s only been one or two courses on it on LinkedIn Learning. So those are all things that you want to consider when you’re.

[7:26] Doing this. So, you know, they have the bite-sized videos, but they also have different class materials and things like that you can use. So YouTube, not YouTube, I was thinking YouTube Premium, that’s a great service too, but we’ll get to that. LinkedIn Learning is great, but the pricing is, in my opinion, a little bit high for what you could get by services like YouTube. And I do purchase YouTube premium so I don’t have ads so I don’t have to worry about all of those things. You know obviously there’s people that put ads in their videos and that’s fine I’m good with that. But I don’t have to have the YouTube ads. So you know we talked about several resources and I won’t rehash those in this show but like we talked about several on the previous show but just Google or YouTube search for different users. And then one thing that’s very useful is look up hashtags, figure out what hashtags on Twitter or Mastodon different people are using and go from there. And one thing that I’ve found very surprising is there’s a huge iOS dev community, hashtag iOS dev community on Twitter. And I pose the same question on Twitter and Mastodon. Which social media platform do you think I heard from first?

[8:54] Do you think it’s Twitter? No. It was Mastodon. And they linked me somewhere to an article that may not have been completely relevant to what I was doing, But it gave me an insight into what could be causing the issue.

[9:12] And you know i’ve always heard that twitter is the place to go for you know communicating and reaching out to people but i think that’s rapidly changing over to mastodon and other social networks. So i would urge you guys if you’re on social media don’t just stick to one platform. Use multiple platforms for coming up with solutions or talking to people because you’re going to find more luck by doing that I’ve certainly done that, You know, we we have the programming for everyone Facebook and discord groups.

[9:51] Yes, and you know, we have other groups and different things. So I think it just depends on, what your your community is and And so your hashtags are going to be very useful for communicating with your communities on these different platforms. So do some research, figure out the best hashtags and follow those hashtags. There’s ways of doing that. You know, I don’t know if you could follow hashtags in the Twitter app. Does anybody in chat know that? Is that something you could do? I know clients allowed you to do that, but I don’t, since there’s no third party clients anymore, I don’t know that that’s doable. So if anybody out there in chat or would like to leave something in the comments about that on the YouTube video, that would be great. We talked about YouTube and we have several resources that we mentioned. Reading books is always a good way to get programming knowledge. And so looking out there, there’s loads of books in the iBooks app on Apple, Amazon, Kindle, all kinds of places. Taylor says she thinks you can follow hashtags, but she’s not sure how to do that. There’s loads of resources out there on different platforms.

[11:14] One book that I recommend anybody read is the take control of shortcuts book from rosemary orchard if you want to just kind of get started in how programming works. It’s a great primer on the shortcuts app and gives you a lot of fundamentals of how programming works. So it’s a kind of a way to get your foot in the door and then there’s books like the swift manual is in iBooks and so there’s books on java. SQL or SQL if you rather, and other languages out there. So it just depends on what you’re interested in. The next thing is that there are training platforms where you can actually get classes. Some examples of this are Udemy, there is TakeLessons, there is Wyzant. So all of these places you can actually get lessons from a developer on how to learn or how to program in a language. Of course, it will just depend on the person’s skill level of who you get and what you can learn.

[12:23] But those things are good to look at too. Another really good resource that I know several people have used is there are Discord communities that spring up around learning a certain thing. So we’ve talked about Free CodeCamp and Codecademy in the previous episode of the show. They have Discord servers. So that’s some ways that you can look at this as well is joining Discords and talking to people. Those are great communities as well. Sometimes a Discord server can be a little overwhelming with the number of people. So I get that, but it’s just learning how to manage that and those kinds of things.

[13:05] TaylorSync TakeLessons has group classes, so that’s another good thing to look at. You know, of course you could look at Craigslist and get somebody that’s a developer from there to help you out, but there are some goods and bads with that, so keep that in mind. There are always so many different things that you could look at that we haven’t even mentioned and resources that I’m probably even forgetting about. So keep those things in mind when you’re going out there and trying to learn to code. If you’re using iOS programming, there is an app called the Swift Playgrounds app and it uses little games to kind of walk you through the essentials of programming in Swift. And these games are accessible. You have to do a lot of memorization. So the Swift Playgrounds app is another way to learn some programming fundamentals. And it’s very fun and accessible. So blind users can use that as well.

[14:14] Taylor Arndt said in chat that you can hire people on Upwork to train you as well and that’s another great resource. I’m sure there’s also resources on Fiverr and places like that. Of course that involves a little more money than going out there and doing it on your own, but those are options if you want to go that route. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is articles. You know, there’s a lot of blogs out there. And yes, and Taylor mentioned Code with Chris is a great YouTube channel. I mentioned that last time, so check that out. Fireship as well. You know, some things that you might want to look at are blogs and newsletters. And like for iOS, I’m a very iOS focused person. If you can’t tell, I love it. There is the iOS Dev Weekly newsletter where they have different topics and things that they talk about. There’s also, Paul Hudson does hacking with Swift as a website where you could go and learn Swift. He also has articles. I did not realize that he updates his articles for the new versions of Swift when they come out, so that’s very useful information. There’s also, and I always can never say this name right, Ray Wunderlich, who does iOS and Android content.

[15:40] And they also have a paywall that you can go through and learn a lot more advanced topics than just the beginner tutorials. Yes, Taylor said there’s so many great YouTube channels teaching code, and she actually has several good ones on her YouTube channel, just look for TaylorArnt.

[16:00] Amongst all the other finance content that she does. So, you know, there’s there’s great places to go out there and learn. And you know Apple Google all these websites, MDN Mozilla developer network and others have great resources if you’re trying to learn, web development or mobile app development or anything. W3Schools is a great website for web development. I’ve used it several times, Stack Overflow. You know, it’s gonna be fun writing all these things down in the show notes, because there’s so many great resources that you can get. And I highly recommend that you look at all these, depending on what your interest is. And when we go to classify all these resources in the show notes, we will classify them by programming language or topic. So you have no worries of being like, oh, there’s just this big blob of links here. Don’t worry about that. We will have you covered. Yes, Taylor said, let’s not forget chat GPT. Chat GPT is a great resource. Like we said last time, it’s maybe not the most.

[17:18] I mean, you know, ChatGPT may not be the most accurate resource, but it can give you inspiration to go on. So again, a lot of these resources we covered on the introductory episode of the show. So go back and check that out. And we will talk more about resources as we go along.

[17:43] But I think this is going to be a kind of a shorter episode today. And we’re going to go ahead and go to the next challenge. And that challenge is to create another console application. And what we want to do in this one is to create a input statement that will take an input, and ask for the name and age and a few other questions, however you want to put, and do some conditions on the age. See if you can do, you know, check if it’s, if a person’s a certain age or younger or older. And I’ll give an example of that next time and print out the information based on their age. You know, maybe combine some strings, all that kind of stuff. And if you need help, just email me at mikedowes.icloud.com and we’ll talk about it. Or, you know, we have our programming for everyone, Discord, and we have our new website that I’ll be working on. And we have our Facebook group and everything in between. We even have a WhatsApp if that’s what, you’re interested in. So all of those things will be coming. You know, we’ll have those in the show notes. So that’s going to be another episode of the Programmatic Podcast. I really enjoyed doing.

[18:52] Music.

[19:02]…