The Curious Coder

I'm a fan of Doctor Who, the iconic British television series that dates back over 50 years. I started watching in the Tom Baker Years, lost track during the Colin Baker years, but have managed to watch every episode currently available, read dozens of novelization and am now discovering the audio adventures. I am such a fanboy that I would watch any Doctor playing Checkers with an ottoman for an hour and proclaim it an instant classic. I liked Christopher Eccleston mostly because he brought my beloved Time Lord back to the screen. But to be honest, I didn't like him as much as I did David Tenant who I liked slightly more than Matt Smith, with Peter Capaldi coming in a close third of the new batch. Then there's Jodie Whittaker. I liked her in "Broadchurch" (which I confess I only watched because it had David Tenant in it and because I also watched him in "Grace Point," the American version of "Broadchurch"), and thought she was great in th...

I'm teaching a lesson on persistence in the browser using Local Storage, Session Storage, and Cookies this week. Of course, I found it interesting that two of the mechanisms are called "Storage" while the other is named, "Cookies." I've used cookies for years, and I always assumed they were named that for a reason along the lines of the "Hansel and Gretal" theory: Cookies were crumbs of information left behind so you could follow your state -- like the fairy tale characters dropped crumbs along their trail to find their way home. Of course, the children's plan was disastrously flawed since woodland creatures consumed the crumbs and they wandered, lost until they were lured to their deaths by the witch living in the gingerbread house. (Note: I know some versions of the story have them surviving the ordeal, but I'm pretty sure in the original version they were the witch's dinner.) It's a reasonable explanation, and many people ...

Curiosity Digest #1 - August 21, 2018 Stuff I'm curious about... Learning Random Computer Terms and a Lifetime of Learning - DEV Community Always like to see blogs and articles about learning. This guy is embarking on an interesting journey. Pick random computer computer terms and post about them. Could me fun!  What I learned by building my own VS Code extension Learning as much as you can about the tools you use is always a good idea. Programming Languages IsJulia a good alternative to R and Python for programmers? PossiblePython rival? Programming language Julia is winning over developers I'm always curious about how new programming languages come to be and gain popularity. Watching JavaScript frameworks come and go is interesting, but computer languages are a whole different story. Tutorials Git Git Tutorials for Beginners - Complete Course For anyone who wants or needs to learn Git, I always recommend seeking out as many different sources of knowled...

I came across an interesting article the other day when I was Googling the word "Curiosity" because, well, what better way to use Google than to just type in a word and see what you get? It was published in a Web Magazine called Nautilus. The title is " Curiosity Depends on What You Already Know ," but what grabbed my attention was the title it showed up under in my Google search results: "Robots and Babies Both Use Curiosity to Learn." How awesome is that? I teach a Web Development Bootcamp, and one of the things I stress to my students is my absolute belief in the power of curiosity. The article puts curiosity on par with hunger, thirst and sex drive as a driving motivation for doing the things we do -- despite the fact that there is no extrinsic reward associated with is as there is with eating, drinking and procreating. Apparently, it's quite common for animals to trade rewards for information -- that is, given a verdant environment filled w...

I use Postman frequently. At some points when I'm heaving into API development, all day long. If you master the scripting and testing capabilities, it can make your life as a coder much easier and serve as a valuable troubleshooting tool as well as an agent of discovery for working with 3rd party API's. Well, they just had their first developer's conference, POST/CON. Everyone seems to need to include slashes or colons or other code related symbology in their conference names. Makes it look cooler than PostCon. Yeah, definitely cooler. I'd much rather go do POST/CON (the ALL CAPS really sold me!) Unfortunately, I was not able to make it there. But they have posted a nice collection of links to the speakers and their slides if you want to take a quick look at what Postman is delivering . I also created a Page of Postman Links that I'll try to keep up to date.

So, I was working in Chrome the other day, and I noticed something when I moused over the reload button. Normally I just hit F5, but I happened to have my hand on the mouse at that time. When I did this, I noticed something I hadn't seen before. There was a tooltip telling me that the button would "Reload this page," but also, "hold to see more options." Well, of course, I pressed and held the mouse button over the Reload icon and was rewarded with this pop-up: Sweet! I often need to make sure I do a hard reload so I don't used cached files, and usually check and uncheck that setting in the Network tab of the Chrome Developer Tools. This seemed like a nice option to have. 

I recently attended the Microsoft Build conference in Seattle. It was my first such conference and although I've been watching live streams and recorded videos from Build, IO, and WWDC over the years, but being there is an altogether different experience. I met some interesting people while I was there. There is a guy, Phillip Labar, who has been first in line for the keynote for the last 8 years. How did I meet him? I was 3rd in line. Phillip got there at 4:00am. I showed up at 5:45am and was only 2 spots behind him, so I think that worked out well for me. Why did I show up so early? Well, the information for the conference warned me that the line for the Keynote started early. I asked the guys at the Information Desk what that meant, and they entertained me with stories of lines snaking out the building by 5:30 in the morning (the Keynote was scheduled to start at 8:30am). Turns out, I woke up at around 5:00am since I was still on Central time (only 7:00am on my bio-clock), ...