CodeNewbie

Latest Episodes:

Ep. 19 - The Hard Way (Zed A. Shaw) Jan 19, 2015

Show notes

Zed A. Shaw, developer and author of the Learn the Hard Way series, talks to us about how to learn to code, his own approach to learning a new programming language, and why he’s not a fan of programming bootcamps. He also answers a few questions from the CodeNewbie community, including what the A in his name stands for.

Zed A. Shaw

Zed A. Shaw is the author of The Hard Way Series of books Learn Python The Hard Way, Learn Ruby The Hard Way, and many more. He's a veteran programmer who has been coding for 20+ years and has written software used by many companies and other programmers. His books teaching programming are read all over the world by millions of people a year. He is a musician, builds guitars, and most recently a beginner painter.

Ep. 18 - Autotune, Inclusivity, and Getting A Job (Vanessa Hurst) Jan 12, 2015

Show notes

Vanessa Hurst, founder of CodeMontage, has spent a lot of her career making tech an inclusive space for all people, particularly women. We talk about how she created that space through Girl Develop It, the non-profit she founded, her perspective on managing your career as a code newbie, and particularly about getting that first tech job.

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Vanessa Hurst

Vanessa Hurst is the Founder & CEO of CodeMontage, which empowers coders to improve their impact on the world. She co-founded and advises Girl Develop It and WriteSpeakCode, and previously worked as a database and analytics engineer. Vanessa loves stationery, gratitude, marshmallows, and really big ideas.

Ep. 17 - Getting Involved (Scott Hanselman) Jan 04, 2015

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You may have heard of Scott Hanselman from his own podcasts and his very popular tech blog. We talk to him about how he creates all this helpful tech content, why it's important to be a social developer, and how we can evaluate our own coding abilities.

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Scott Hanselman

Scott is a web developer who has been blogging at http://hanselman.com for over a decade. He works in Open Source on ASP.NET and the Azure Cloud for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland, Oregon.

Ep. 16 - Code Ghost (Jenn Schiffer) Dec 28, 2014

Show notes

Engineer and artist Jenn Schiffer talks to us about the Vart Institute, the side project that blends her love of art with her love of javascript. We dive into how she brings those two worlds together, what the difference is between teaching an eight-year old and an eighty-year old how to code (she’s taught both), and about her experience working on the academic side of computer science.

Jenn Schiffer

Jenn Schiffer is an engineer, artist, and tech satirist who loves open web technology and open source, as well as 8-bit art and not taking the web development world so seriously

Ep. 15 - Intro to DevOps (Christopher Webber) Dec 21, 2014

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There's more to coding than just your code. In this episode, we talk to developer Chris Webber about devops, and all of the infrastructure-related things that are also important in getting your app to work. We untangle some devops concepts, like feature flats and the different programming environments, and talk through what a code newbie should know about devops when working on their code projects.

Christopher Webber

Christopher Webber is a Community Software Engineer at Chef Software and a lover of all things *Ops. Chris is an organizer of HangOps, LA DevOps, SysAdvent, and has a podcast called Ops All The Things.

Ep. 14 - On Testing (Noel Rappin) Dec 14, 2014

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You've probably heard of this idea of testing. Or maybe you've just heard of test driven development and you're not really sure what it is or whether or not you should learn about it. In this episode, Noel Rappin, developer and author of the new book "Rails 4 Test Prescriptions" gives us a newbie-friendly explanation of the world of testing. We talk about different types of tests, we walk through an example of how you can approach something with tests first, and why test driven development can be a great tool for planning and organizing your code, especially as a code newbie.

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Noel Rappin

Noel Rappin is the Director of Talent and a Senior Developer at Table XI (tablexi.com). He is the author of multiple technical books including “Rails 4 Test Prescriptions”, “Trust-Driven Development”, and “Master Space and Time With JavaScript”.

Ep. 13 - The Not-So-Amateur Programmer (Lauren Orsini) Dec 07, 2014

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If you're looking for solid, newbie-friendly guides to tech, Lauren Orsini's got you covered. As a tech journalist for ReadWrite, she's written some CodeNewbie favorites, including a great explanation of git and GIthub. We talk about her writing process, how she tackles a new piece of technology and learns it well enough to write about it, and why she calls herself an "amateur" programmer and really needs to stop.

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Lauren Orsini

Lauren Orsini is a technology journalist and total geek. Her first book on Raspberry Pi hardware hacking comes out next month.

Ep. 12 - Mother Coders (Tina Lee) Nov 30, 2014

Show notes

When it was time for lunch, the other students ate and got to know each other while Tina Lee searched for a place to nurse her baby. The only one she found in that coding workshop was the cold, dark, filthy room where the company's developers slept - at least that's what it looked like. And she sat, frustrated that in a workshop that was meant to be inclusive, she still felt very much alone. So she started Mother Coders, the tech education program designed for mothers who want to gain technical skills. We talk about the challenges of being a mom learning to code, how organizers can make their tech events more mom-friendly, and how to make coding more accessible to all mothers.

Tina Lee

Ep. 11 - 24 Pull Requests (Andrew Nesbitt) Nov 23, 2014

Show notes

It was just a static webpage, telling you to get in the holiday spirit by making open source contributions. But 24 Pull Requests soon became its own open source project, with people adding features to make it fun and easy to make those contributions. We talk to creator Andrew Nestbitt about how code newbies can get started in making open source contributions, why getting involved in open source is a great idea, and how to get over the intimidation you might feel at the prospect of making your first pull request.

Andrew Nesbitt

Andrew is a freelance software developer, based in Bath, England. He spends most of his days programming in Ruby, playing with JavaScript, contributing to open source projects and organising local developer user groups.

Ep. 10 - Nitpicks and Devils (Katrina Owen) Nov 16, 2014

Show notes

She calls them nitpicks, her term for the code reviews people get on exercism.io. It's a platform that developer Katrina Owen created to help people get mentorship and feedback on their code. It started as a project for her own students, but grew into something much more. Katrina talks to us about building her platform to help people become better programmers, how she went from being a secretary to studying biology to being a programmer, and how code newbies can make the most of exercism.io.

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Katrina Owen

Katrina is an open source advocate at GitHub. She accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She works primarily in Go and Ruby, contributes to several open source projects, and is the creator of exercism.io, a platform for leveling up your programming skills.