Udacity Web Development course

Like many other Londoners, on my daily commute I plug in my earphones and listen to a variety of podcasts in an attempt to block out the what-I-like-to-call "post-apocalyptic nightmare" that is travelling on the London Underground during rush hour (when your transport infrastructure is more than 100 years old, it's always rush hour).  One of my favourite podcasts is TEDTalks, which is a series of short videos of "Ideas worth spreading" and I like it because they cover such a vast range of topics, some are serious, some more entertaining, they do vary in quality, but I always learn something new from watching a TED video (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design).

One I watched recently was about what makes a new word officially a word, and one of the examples was "adorkable" (A guy that is a nerd, but in a very cute/adorable way), and this word actually made it into the Collins English Dictionary very recently.  For me, the embodiment of adorkable is Steve Huffman, co-founder of reddit, who is the instructor for a great Web Development course I took this year with Udacity.com.

What is printed in the dictionary, under the definition of "adorkable"

This course requires basic knowledge of Python and is a good follow-on to Udacity's Intro to Computer Science 101 course that I did a few months ago.  The course is focused on building a basic blog website as a web application from the ground up, using Google App Engine to develop and host the site.  You start off by learning some basic HTML, but the majority of the course is not focused on the appearance of the website (i.e. "the front-end"), rather you learn the programming associated with creating and storing new blog posts, displaying these posts, as well as creating user accounts and how cookies work (i.e. "back-end" development).  As a side-project that compliments the main blog-building part of the course, you also learn how to build a website that allows users to submit ASCII art.  You can see my code for both the blog assignment and the ascii art website on my GitHub account.

For your enjoyment, here's a pretty awesome retro-cool example of a simple ASCII art piece:
             

             |\_|\
             | a_a\
             | | "]
         ____| '-\___
        /.----.___.-'\
       //        _    \
      //   .-. (~v~) /|
     |'|  /\:  .--  / \
    // |-/  \_/____/\/~|
   |/  \ |  []_|_|_] \ |
   | \  | \ |___   _\ ]_}
   | |  '-' /   '.'  |
   | |     /    /|:  |
   | |     |   / |:  /\
   | |     /  /  |  /  \
   | |    |  /  /  |    \
   \ |    |/\/  |/|/\    \
    \|\ |\|  |  | / /\/\__\
     \ \| | /   | |__
   snd    / |   |____)
          |_/

I found the course very engaging (not just because of Steve Huffman - he actually wasn't the best lecturer!). Although the set-up was obviously a lot simpler than what is used by "real" websites, understanding how to create user accounts with passwords, logging users in and out, storing and retrieving the blog posts using a database, caching pages etc was really interesting and gives you a basic understanding of how web applications work.  It was also encouraging and inspiring to know that when Steve Huffman co-founded reddit, his experience in web development was about the same as the pre-requisite level of knowledge for this course!

Although overall this is a course that I would thoroughly recommend, and given that it's a totally free resource, I feel bad about complaining, but there were some aspects that I found lacking.  First of all, it was a downright pain installing and running Google App Engine on my Windows laptop - if it wasn't for the advice that was posted on the Udacity forums by other users and answers I found via in-depth googling, I would not have been able to get it to work.  Google App Engine is a platform that you use to write the back-end code for your web application and get it functioning on a real life website. However, Google have now come up with something called Cloud Playground, which looks like it would give you all the functionality of App Engine without having to install anything! This brings me onto my main gripe about this course - it was created a few years ago and the world of web development is evolving so fast that some of the course content is already not as relevant as it could be.

You might be wondering by now why I'm not using the content of the course to host this blog.  As I mentioned earlier, the course focuses almost entirely on the back-end, which means the appearance of the blog that you build with the course leaves a lot to be desired.  To help improve the front end, I went along to a few Codebar sessions to get some expert input.  Codebar is a fantastic (and free!) initiative set up to give free one-on-one coding advice and tutorials to people who are under-represented in the tech industry (i.e. women, ethnic minorities and LGBT).  These sessions take place on a weekly basis around the Silicon Roundabout, where students are paired up with coaches, who are all full-time professional web developers, plus there's free pizza!

FREE PIZZA!!!!!!!!!!

On a serious note, the Codebar organisers and coaches are actually *amazing* and I feel so lucky and grateful I live near to such an incredible and generous resource, that I haven't done anything to deserve!!!

When I rocked up with my  blog web application, no one had heard of  Google App Engine or the template language (Jinja) that was used in the course to build the basic framework of the individual blog pages.  It was also very difficult and frustrating to get the back-end stuff that I had written to work with some of the commonly used "industry standard" templates.  After a while, I also began to realise that I was basically re-inventing the wheel and while I was learning a lot along the way, it would be productive to get to grips with a more widely used set up and learn how to customise that rather than committing to a project where I had built the back end....this is still a work in progress, so, watch this space!

Computer Science 101 @ Udacity

 

 On the recommendation of a friend, I decided to begin my journey into programming with a free Introduction to Computer Science 101 course at udacity.com.  While there are many courses online, I stuck with this one as I liked the fact it involved training videos and quizzes, which made the whole learning experience a lot more interactive rather than passive, and also I found the enthusiasm and friendliness of the course instructor (Professor David Evans of the University of Virginia) very engaging.  (I have a soft spot for endearingly geeky men – perhaps another good reason to do a career change into computer programming).  Udacity was set up by Sebastian Thrun and has a rather noble goal to "bring accessible, affordable, engaging, and highly effective higher education to the world", not just in Computer Science but also Psychology, Biology, Maths and Physics.  Sebastian Thrun is the closest thing the world of programming has to a rock star (see the pic below) - not content with being a Research Professor at Stanford University and a Google Fellow, he is the inventor of the autonomous car and project lead on Google Glass, as well as being a generally all round cool dude.

 

What a guy!  I wish he was my friend...

The course is taught using the programming language Python, assumes zero knowledge of computer science, and teaches you many basic concepts in the context of building a simple web search engine.  What’s really incredible is that if you stick with the course, you do actually end up programming an extremely rudimentary search engine!  Obviously there is a fair bit of hand holding, as the course sets up the framework of the search engine programme for you, but you do build the code yourself and are able to understand the individual components of the programme and how they link with each other.

The course is broken up into multiple units, with each unit introducing a new aspect of computer science and using it to add another section to your search engine code.  A typical format of a unit involves a series of tutorial videos, each one delivered with a hearty dose of passion and joviality by Professor Evans and his assistant PhD student Peter Chapman, interspersed with quizzes (some multiple choice, or involving simple calculations).  You do not have to get the answers right in order to progress, and a full explanation of the answer is always given in the next video.  At the end of the unit, there are a series of homework questions that help to consolidate what you’ve learned, and also develop the way you use your newly acquired knowledge.  Some of these are marked with a “gold star” (or even 2-3 stars) as they require the student to engage their grey matter and think slightly beyond the course material that has been fed to them, solving a puzzle using the knowledge they have acquired, but with a slight twist.  While I did find some of these problem solving exercises really very tricky, they are by no means impossible and  I always learnt something by continuing to work on them, and when you do finally get the green message that says your code is Correct, it feels SO GOOD!  They also have forums where you can ask for help from other users (aka “udacians”) and discuss topics from the course – while I never actually contributed material to the forums, reading the posts of others who were stuck on similar questions and the kind people who replied to help explain the issue, was always super helpful.

Yes, even a newb can end up building this:

I think what’s really satisfying about the course is that you do get to a basic level of familiarity with a widely used programming language, you gain a simple understanding of the concepts of how Google works and it’s an exciting sneak peak into what can be achieved by further study in computer science!  Of course, this also makes you realise how much there is still left to learn…

Thoughts about the Udacity course in Summary:

Pros:

• Pitched at complete beginners and introduces the main basic concepts of computer science
• Makes you think on your own, rather than spoon feeding
• Downloadable Youtube videos  and pdf course materials help make the course a very polished and professional learning experience

Cons:

• Some exercises do get quite tricky – this can be disconcerting for beginners, but you feel immense satisfaction when you work out the solution
• After a few units the focus of the course narrows to the web search engine very specifically
• The overall course is quite long, and it’s difficult to break down each unit into bitesize chunks, meaning you have to find the time and perseverance to get to the finished product