Blog
From newbies and
not-so-newbies
Give the Gift of Coding: 5 Non-profit Orgs to Support this Season
It’s the giving season, our annual reminder that we can make a difference in our communities by supporting organizations doing great work. We’ve picked five of our favorite organizations that are working to make technical skills accessible to... more
Create Your Own CSS & HTML Holiday Trees
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to make a holiday tree using shapes made only of HTML and CSS. We’ll be... more
The CodeNewbie Holiday Wish List
The holidays are here! It’s time to exchange gifts with those near and dear to us, and maybe grab something for yourself too. If you’re shopping for a coder, here are some fun gift ideas.
Bitcoin Paper Wallet with Bitcoin in... more
5 Possible Reasons Why Your Codeland CFP Talk Wasn't Selected
We're hard at work planning Codeland 2018, and we just selected speakers from the CFP. Out of the hundreds of submissions we received for talks (we're still working on... more
What emojis tell us about encoding
They're our punchlines. They're our kisses. They're our favourite way to share a lol. Emojis do a lot of work for us. But sometimes emojis don't show up properly, even though the text around them comes through just fine. For example, this... more
How to get unstuck during a pair-programming interview
One of the hardest parts of pair programming is figuring out what to do when you get stuck. Especially when you're pair programming as part of a job interview. What do you say? How do you prove you’re a reliable, competent coder, when you... more
Bits, Bytes, and the Shift Toward 64-bit Apps
BACKGROUND - FAMILIAR USES OF MEGABYTES
You may be familiar with seeing megabytes (MB) and gigabytes (GB) as measures of computer memory. For example, think about sharing photos. You open an email. You attach a photo. The... more
How Do Browsers Work?
The web browser is one of those things that we rely on to “automagically” do amazing things for us. Show me how to find coffee nearby…now! But how exactly does it turn code into pixels? CodeNewbie invited
How can I practice pair programming?
Pair programming is part of the day-to-day software development process for many companies, and it can also be used as part of the technical interview process. When interviewing job candidates, it’s a helpful way to see how you might perform on... more
Apple Rejected My App. What Do I Do Now?
App Store rejections can be discouraging and downright puzzling. We’re here to help.
According to Apple, 51% of App Store rejections fall into just 3... more
Profile: Alicia Carr
Reading time: 4 minutes
Creating an app that goes viral is every developer’s dream.... more
What is Swift?
Reading time: 3 minutes
Swift is the newest language available for developing apps for Apple products — all of them! Though Swift is synonymous with iOS and iPhones, one of the exciting reasons to learn it is that you can also... more
New Scholarship Program for Web and Mobile Development
Google and Udacity have teamed up to offer a new scholarship for 50,000 people to learn web development or mobile development (Android) skills. It’s a big step for them. CodeNewbie spoke with Stuart Frye, VP of Economic Opportunity at Udacity,... more
Mentors on how to get a job in gaming, get started in VR, and use side projects to learn
Our first #MentorMonday focused on gaming. We had three amazing mentors with years of experience in the industry share their thoughts, answer your questions,... more
Five common mistakes when writing a technical blog post
I just finished reading over 200 writing samples for our tech writer position. Overall, I was blown away by the quality of the writing I reviewed. The pieces that stood out had personality, understood the newbie-ness of the reader, and had... more
100 Days of Code: CodeNewbie Edition
For our last podcast episode of 2016, we interviewed Alex Kallaway, the creator of the #100DaysofCode challenge. He told us about the ups and downs of finishing the... more
Submit to the CodeNewbie Newsletter
We've redesigned our CodeNewbie newsletter to help you in your coding journey. And if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, more
Logo Contest Winner Announced!
We got over 150 submissions for our CodeNewbie logo contest, and we're so excited to finally announce the winner. Huge congrats to Jon Samp for his awesome logo (checkout... more
Celebrating 100 Podcast Episodes
We're a few episodes away from our 100th podcast episode! I'm so excited and humbled by all the awesome people who've been on the show, from well-known programmers like more
CodeNewbie Logo Contest
We love our green hashtag, but we need a new logo. So we’re turning to our CodeNewbie family for help! Submit your logo design to the CodeNewbie Logo Contest!
The winner will get $200 worth of services from
Sphero Dance Party
My favorite toys allow me to take them apart and put them back together again. Looking at the individual components and how they fit together helps me to learn how they work. It also lets me tinker with the pieces and try to turn them into... more
Password Checker
Good passwords are an important part of life on the internet today. They can keep our computers secure and help us maintain our peace of mind knowing that our data is safe.
There are many guidelines available that help us make... more
Calculations
Math can get complicated quickly. To help with this complexity, we have created tools to help us solve math problems. Abacuses are devices used to keep track of numbers and complex... more
Hello CodeNewbies!
Welcome back to the CodeNewbie Challenge! It is January and perhaps you have made a coding resolution, or you are just looking to improve your skills.... more
Just One More
This CodeNewbie Challenge is about incrementing numbers. Incrementing is the process of adding one to a number, making the number one larger. Consider the following example:
x = 0... more
Secret Santa Challenge
Before starting the next CodeNewbie challenge, I would like to thank everyone who has participated in the challenge thus far. You have created a wonderful variety of solutions and made this project lots of fun.
Thank you for... more
Ruby Roundup 5
Ruby Monk is a fun, interactive overview of the Ruby language. Each topic has a short explanation followed by a code example and a quick exercise. I find that it is especially helpful as a... more
Code Breaker
The Message
From the time of Alan Turing and the codebreakers of Bletchley Park to today, computers have been closely tied to secret codes and cryptography. In this Code Newbie Challenge, we will be using our computers to decode... more
Zombie Alert! A CodeNewbie Challenge
Warning!
Increased undead activity has been detected.
The Human Protection League is on high alert and is preparing to defend against a zombie attack. Recent reports give them reason to believe that the restless... more
Mobile Roundup 6
One of the most important aspects of developing an application is usability. When you come up with your app concept, you... more
Ruby Roundup 4
Try Ruby: If you’ve never touched Ruby before, this is a great place to start.... more
Ante Up
You have been contacted by CNB Tech Security who is in dire need of technical assistance. CNB Tech Security provides security services for the World Poker Federation, a prestigious Poker Tournament.
CNB Tech Security has received reports... more
Iron Coder #3: Iron Cloud Project
Congratulations!! Your work on the wacky Word Madness project was a success! In fact, it was so successful that... more
Ruby Roundup 3
Understanding Ruby Blocks, Procs & Lambdas - The author begins his article with the statement that “Blocks,... more
Mobile Roundup 5
JTCalendar - JTCalendar is an iOS open source calendar control library. If you need your users to pick a date within your app, this library allows... more
First Iron Coder Project: FizzBuzz
Synopsis
The first Iron Coder challenge is Fizz Buzz, which outputs a list of numbers after performing some substitutions on it. Sometimes a number will be replaced by “Fizz” and other times it will be replaced by... more
Building the Hangman Game
The first time that I gotta hear about the Code Newbie community was through an episode on the Giant Robots podcast with Saron as the guest. Being someone who has used Rails(for backend development) for a while along with very little javascript... more
Front-End Roundup 3
SlideRuler's UX Design School- Is a course composed of 116+ hours of videos, articles and blog posts, all free and... more
Leading the Hangman Project
The hangman game got off to a slow start. We initially tried to organize our user stories and tasks with Github issues. I’ll be blunt: it was a mess. In theory we could use labels to identify high-priority items. Without the ability to sort our... more
Python Thursday Group Adventure
One of great things great things about coding is that is it fun to do alone and it is even more fun to do as a team. Being a productive team in a larger, friendly community is a great experience.
As developers we have created tools... more
My First Project
Anyone who has walked the path of a developer knows, in the beginning, a big fear is working as a team. Even if you are learning how to code formally, through a college or university, you undoubtedly get nervous when the words, teamwork, or... more
Three Lessons (of Many!) Learned
Two months, 216 commits, and 28 pull requests later, we’ve built a text adventure game in Python. And along the way, I’ve learned a few things both as a contributor and as a facilitator for the project. Below are three of the many lessons... more
The Lessons They Never Teach You
So I am sitting here thinking about my first blog post for Ruby Monday. Should I talk about code? Should I talk about testing? Should I talk about using has_many through relationships? You can learn that from documentation... more
Advice for Code Newbies
(aka A Thinly Veiled Plug for Ruby Monday) Come to think of it, I couldn't tell you how I heard about Ruby Monday in the first place. My best guess is the Code Newbie website via the podcast. Regardless of route (routes.rb?), I'm so glad I... more
Testing Views in Multiple Browsers
I was recently tasked with writing the views for our tags on the Ruby Monday group’s blog. The code is standard HTML with ERB for the... more
Postgres Encoding Issues
One of our community members had some trouble setting up our team project on his dev environment (cloud 9). He received some help but that wasn't enough. He... more
Mobile Roundup 3
Android Arsenal - As a mobile developer, sometimes it’s hard to find libraries for a feature you need in your application without tons of Googling. Android... more
Front-End Roundup 2
Mockflow - You finally have a project in mind, you open up your web browser and start coding. Before you know it, you’ve spent more hours playing around with button... more
Ruby Roundup 2
Jekyll Blog - If you’re looking for a first Ruby project, I highly recommend making a blog with Jekyll. Jekyll is a Ruby gem that gives you all the ingredients you need to... more
Saturday Discussion
We're starting a new Code Newbie project: The Saturday Discussion. We're hoping to provide the community with guided talks on different coding concepts. These talks are not always... more
Mobile Roundup 2
Sinch - If you’re building an app that requires instant messaging between users or even voice calls, the Sinch API will allow you to integrate IM, SMS, and Voice... more
Ruby Roundup 1
Our bi-weekly roundup of all things ruby! Well, just five things. Whether you're a ruby newbie or a more experienced rubyist, there's a great resource here for you. And if you've got a suggestion to include in a future roundup, post... more
Front-End Roundup 1
What is Front-End Development? Is it really just coding the designs handed to us, or can we, as coders, also submerge ourselves in the world of UX/UI and Design? In this bi-weekly Front-End Roundup, we’ll share 5 newbie-friendly resources. If... more
The Story of PHP
PHP is a very popular server-side scripting language (a language that is not compiled, but interpreted), used by millions of developers all around the world. Like all programming languages, it has a history. It’s been through many different... more
Mobile Roundup 1
NSHipster - Ever come across a tutorial that breezes through the explanation of a very obscure class or library? Not... more
Resource Roundup 6
Every week, we’ll share 5 of the most valuable, newbie-friendly posts and resources. If you come across something valuable that you think should be included be sure to let us know and I may include that in a future week’s post! You can post... more
Resource Roundup 5
Every week, we’ll share 5 of the most valuable, newbie-friendly posts and resources. If you come across something valuable that you think should be included be sure to let us know and I may include that in a future week’s post! You can post... more
Getting Started with iOS: Objective-C vs. Swift
If you are interested in learning iOS programming and making iPhone/iPad applications, your first step is deciding which language to learn, Objective-C or Swift. In June 2014, Apple announced their new programming language, Swift, at their... more
Resource Roundup 4
Every week, we’ll share 5 of the most valuable, newbie-friendly posts and resources. If you come across something valuable that you think should be included be sure to let us know and I may include that in a future week’s post! You can post... more
Why You Should Test Your Code
You may have heard people talk about testing their code. Another way to put it is writing specs. But what's that all about? To understand why we test, let's start with a simpler question. Take a look at the code snippet below.
Is... more
What Is Source Control?
You have probably come across tutorials, tweets or blog posts that talk about something called git. If you are like me, your eyes begin to glaze over as you think to yourself “Great! Another short-worded technical term that I have no clue... more
Resource Roundup 3
Every week, we’ll share 5 of the most valuable, newbie-friendly posts and resources. If you come across something valuable that you think should be included be sure to let us know and I may include that in a future week’s post! You can post... more
Resource Roundup 2
Every week, we’ll share 5 of the most valuable, newbie-friendly posts and resources. If you come across something valuable that you think should be included be sure to let us know and I may include that in a future week’s post! You can post... more
Speaking At RailsConf
A couple weeks ago, I gave my talk Coding: Art or Craft? at RailsConf, the largest conference for Ruby on Rails, a popular web... more
Resource Roundup - No.1
Every week, we’ll share 5 of the most valuable, newbie-friendly posts and resources. If you come across something valuable that you think should be included be sure to let us know and I may include that in a future week’s post! You can post... more
Python Thursday
If you're learning Python and you're looking for a a real project to work on with a group of friendly code newbies, join us for #PythonThursday. Our first project is a text-based adventure game.
Object Oriented Programming vs. Functional Programming
If you’ve spent much time in online tech forums or following technical folks on Twitter, you’ve probably heard an ongoing debate about the relative merits of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and Functional Programming (FP). What are they and... more
How To Solve FizzBuzz
FizzBuzz is a simple game, often used in interview questions. The idea is to list a range of numbers, and if the number is divisible by 3 output "Fizz", or if the number is divisible by 5 output "Buzz". Finally if the number is divisible by... more
JavaScript Tuesday
If you're learning JavaScript and you're looking for a a real project to work on with a group of friendly code newbies, join us for #JavascriptTuesday. Our first project is building hangman.
My Rails Conference Experience
My trip started off like any other cross country trip I’ve taken: I packed my bags and headed for the airport. I was super excited for the upcoming conference and my very first RailsConf. I’ve been to many software engineering conferences, but... more
Ruby Monday
If you're learning ruby, come meet with some awesome CodeNewbies who are learning too. We're doing a team project with code reviews and pull requests, using the collaborative tools you'd need on the job. So sign up for our
Our Code of Conduct
This policy was adopted from the FrontendLondon Slack community.This policy is a "living" document, and subject to refinement and expansion in the future. This policy... more
My Bootcamp Experience
I get a lot of questions about my bootcamp experience. Here are the answers to the most frequently asked questions I get. Hope you find it helpful.
Why did you pick ruby?
I did a lot of research, and found... more
Saturday Coding
Coding is more fun when we do it together. Even if you’re working on your own thing, it’s nice to know other people are learning to code alongside you. That’s why we’re starting “Saturday Coding.”
Sign up for our
Hardware? Not So Hard
I was terrified of hardware. I'd written software for decades, but had been spooked by a coder friend with an engineering degree who said "I like software better. When you do something wrong, you get an error message instead of a tiny puff of... more
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Arduino and Raspberry Pi
Technology is making its way into everyday items at a dizzying pace. A great example is the NEST learning thermostat and how it changed the way we interact with our home heating... more
Getting Starting With Making
So you've heard about the "Maker Movement" and you'd like to try building a few projects of your own, but aren't sure where to start? Here's a bunch of resources that will help you begin your own Maker adventure.
First, you need... more
When an old-timer becomes a newbie
My first programming language was COBOL.* That was back in the day, when mainframes were all the rage. I was hooked by the buzz I got from seeing the computer do what I told it to do, even if that was “please spit out pharmaceutical sales... more
Our One-Year Anniversary
A year ago, we had our very first #CodeNewbie twitter chat. I held my breath when I sent that first tweet. I was nervous, and I prayed that someone would tweet back.
They did. And... more
How to Make a Pull Request
Making your first pull request can be both an exciting and stressful endeavor. Your mind begins to flood with questions like “How can a newbie contribute to a project?”, “Where do I even begin?” and “What the heck is a pull request anyway?!?!”... more
What is "Open Source"?
If you’re in the tech industry, even as a code newbie, you’ve probably heard the term “open source.” And more than likely, you’ve used open source tools to code and learn to code. But open source isn’t a new concept. It started some forty years... more
From Zero to Yahoo!
My first open-source contribution was in 2009, about a year after switching from Java to Ruby. At that time the Java community didn’t put a premium on contributing to open-source, but Ruby clearly did. I felt some serious social pressure to... more
I am Christina
For many years, I didn’t understand code or its impact on every aspect of life. And so I rejected it.
This changed a few years ago when I was hired to complete the development of a new Identity Management application. It wasn’t a... more
Saying Yes
I decided in high school that I wanted to help people through science and technology somehow . I came across programming in college and saw all the amazing things people created . After attending a hackathon as an observer to see how people... more
Scraped Knees
Sunshine, helmets, scraped knees. The joy you both feel when a bike finally takes off and doesn't crash again within 15 seconds. They’re all part of the iconic experience of teaching a child to ride a bike. There are dozens of these moments... more
What I look for in a junior developer
Company Size: 50 total, 5 developers
Field/Industry: Online Advertising
Dev Responsibilities: Build internal tools to support the sales staff and account managers.
Stack: Several dozen apps using Ruby, Rails/Sinatra with an...
more
Asking For Help
Sigh. I really hate this place.
I’ve decided to build a feature, and I’m trying to decide how to approach it. The options seem endless. And by endless, I mean confusing. I have a short list of criteria I’d like my final solution to meet:-... more
Summer Check-In
I forgot to go to the beach again.I heard lots of beach stories, seen my share of #imonaboat pics, but for some... more
Learn-to-Code Metrics
I was pretty obsessed with understanding how I learn. Not how a person learns, but how I learn. I had to. Finding out what worked, what didn’t work, and measuring how much I learned was a matter of survival. The cost of not maximizing my... more