Category: Open Source

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Code School will be Having a Black Friday Special!

CodeSchool logo

I have found Code School to be a great resource both for those just learning to code as well as those who are experienced coders, but want to learn a new programming language. It has multiple paths: Ruby (including Ruby on Rails), JavaScript (includes jQuery and CoffeeScript), HTML/CSS, iOS, Git, and an Electives path for miscellaneous technologies such as R and Chrome DevTools.

The normal price for a subscription at Code School is $29 per month, or $290 per year. However, it appears that they intend to run a Black Friday special for yearly subscriptions. The price will be revealed this Friday. If you don’t already have a subscription, or your subscription is about to run out, this could be a good time to sign up!

Unfortunately, Code School is still lacking Python, though you can learn it at Codecademy (which is free).

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Data Transformation Tool Built for the 2014 Open Houston Hackathon – “Mr. CSV Transformer”

open source data transformation tool

This past weekend, over 200 people attended the second annual Open Houston Hackathon. The project I worked on with my team proved to be very interesting, not only because of its focus – making government more efficient through the sharing of purchasing data using the Price History application developed originally by the GSA, and certainly not least because of the two men I had the privilege of collaborating with – but also because half of the project involved developing a tool that could have wide application apart from the Price History application.

The tool that we developed was forked from another similar product called “Mr. Data Converter” that would allow a CSV or tab delimited file to easily be converted into many other formats. The product I worked on has even greater functionality – the exclusion, reordering, and renaming of columns to produce one that can be uploaded into another application. The tool my team produced is called “Mr. CSV Transformer”.

open source data transformation tool

Clever, no? While many tools exist that can do this (such as SSIS) this is a Web-based tool that can easily be used by someone who may not have the time to learn or use these other more complicated tools. This is a purely HTML / JavaScript / jQuery based tool that does not require any special type of Web server, as all the work is done in the front end. No need for node.js, Rails, ColdFusion, etc. Just Apache, IIS, or whatever flavor of Web server you prefer will work just fine. Also, I am currently hosting it from a GitHub page, so you don’t even have to install it yourself.

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One Year of Blogging at “Deep In The Code”!

cupcake with one year candle

I’ve been writing this blog for just over a year now; my first post was on May 23, 2012. I haven’t written as many articles as I would have liked over the last year, I think due to the fact that I’ve been too selective in what I wrote about (for fear of moving the blog off-topic) and some of the articles have been too long. I will endeavor to write shorter, but more frequent articles for the second year of this blog!

I enjoy the feedback I get (when it’s not spam) as it tells me if I’m writing about something that people care about, so please continue writing back!

My goals from last year never fully materialized, as I intended to learn OS X / iOS / Objective-C programming when I bought my MacBook Pro last year. While I did dip into the pool of Xcode programming, it was only a shallow dip. Instead, I have focused more on learning open source technologies – mostly Python and Ruby on Rails. Once I get a handle on these two, I intend to revisit iOS programming – though I may end up using RubyMotion instead of Objective-C. Only time will tell!

Thanks for reading my blog, and please feel free to make suggestions on what you would like to read about in the future!