Learning code, bit by bit
If you have been somewhat active in a development community, you probably have already heard about React. I stepped aside of it for quite a long time, but now I don’t have any alternative: I need to mingle with React code at work.
In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to use its recommended basic building blocks: the function components. I will do so by building a simple Checkers board.
Finite state machines are a common way to structure a program. But do you know how to build an efficient one while benefiting plainly from Object Oriented Programming best practices?
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It always feels good when we nail down a nasty bug, doesn’t it? But it is always a painful experience when our user discover new ones. So what about solving them ‘by design’, before they even get in production?
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Game jams are events I do really enjoy. I’m not a professional game developer, but they tend to push my programming knowledge, development workflow and problem solving skills through an intense test. Last week, I registered for 8 Bit to Infinity’s Text Only Jam, but failed to submit a game before the deadline. In this post I’m gonna share with you the lessons I’ve drawn from this experience.
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Automated testing, sometimes clumsily referred as unit testing (because unit tests are a part of the broader concept of automated tests), is a practice in development in which I’m really interested. Its point is to have code that inspect your code, to see if the former behave like you expect. While it obviously makes you write more code, its goal is to pay back the time you’ve invested into writing your test code by helping you discovering the bugs you may introduce during your development iterations.
More specifically, what I will demonstrate in this post is how to start using a quite rigorous approach of this practice which is called Test Driven Development. This specific way of thought advocates to write your tests before you start writing your production code. This might seems a little weird when you hear about it the first time, because you will basically be testing something that doesn’t exist yet. So I will use a practical case where I implemented it to let you understand how it works and how it benefited me.
(more…)During the Paris WordCamp 2019, there was lots of great talks. Although you will be able to watch those again on wordpress.tv, there was also some more informal talks, in which participants seated in sofas and on chairs around low table and discussed predefined topics, supported by a coordinator.
I want to report to you one of these open talks, as I found the information exposed could be pretty useful. It was about WordPress security, and our coordinator was Julio Potier, founder of the security plugin SecuPress, director of the WPFR organization, and WordPress consultant for years (between other roles…). Needless to say, that we all had lots of question to ask him.
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In the software industry, every software goes through several versions during it’s lifecycle. But how to efficiently keep track of changes and provide older versions for compatibility purpose? Sure, we can keep a large collection of .zip files, but there is a better way of doing it, it could apply to a lot more domains than the software industry:
(more…)For about 6 months now, I’ve been teaching code to beginners along with a non-profit organization named Les Bricodeurs (in French, it’s a mash-up word of ‘tinkerer’ and ‘coder’). I won’t go into detail for every activity this organization is engaged in, but in a bulk: teaching kids to program bots, organizing talks about digital medias and citizenship, preparing a yearly hackathon, and the list goes on with each of our members’ initiatives.
(more…)What I’ll discuss here will be very theoretic about setting up your journey to learning some new skills. It could apply to other fields than programming, but since the theme of this blog is specifically to discuss the learning of programming skills, I will use it for examples. But whatever field you’re wanting to learn, you’ll have to start somewhere that’s for sure. So, enough chatter, let’s jump right in the subject.
(more…)I know there are many developers out there that have started their career by what we call a bootcamp, I’m one of them.
Am I the typical one? Is there such a thing as a “typical” bootcamp developer? All I can do here, is talk about my experience. I’ll start by giving you some details so you may have a better understand of my point of view (besides, we all know that development is in the details, right?).
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