Starting Projects

[Brandon Mason]

The topic-based discussions have been awesome, and I want to thank all of you who've participated so far.  I think this group has more potential though.  What do you all think about shifting the focus towards projects?

Overview

It seems like a lot of members are looking to ramp up from beginner to intermediate.  Projects are an excellent way to do that.  If you're an experienced member, you may wish to participate in projects as an advisor, designer, and/or coder (up to you).  I also would love to have some help working on the framework/environment.

I think we're going to need the following to set people up for success:

• Suggested project ideas.
• Standard tools and tutorials to help people get started.
• Ways to communicate/collaborate/organize.
• A venue to present our creations.

What to Build

• Tell a story (lovely way to get started and have fun with programming)
• Build a useful widget (calculator, clock, information dashboard) 
  

Discussion

What tools would help people get started building things?  I'm talking about things like IDEs, frameworks, and tutorials.  I would love it if we could build up a set of "starter kits" for people looking to build using different technologies.  Much of the resources could be found online, but we might want to write our own tutorials or package things for our purposes.

I'd like to open up the discussion for anyone who has ideas that will help us get started.  Keep in mind, our next meetup is a week from now (Wednesday March 25).  I have a jQuery option that I'll throw out, but I'd love to hear other options.

Best wishes,

--

Brandon Mason

Torchlight Software

623.882.4246

[Brandon Mason]

Here's some proposals I have that might help the group.  These are all open source projects, and I would love it if other people got involved.  Feel free to talk to me more about that, or just fork a project on github and send a pull request.

Starter Kit

I have a jQuery tutorial that we can use for story-telling (switch out pictures on a central stage).  It's a pretty basic starting point, but I think we can make it better over time.

I think it would also be great to have a starter kit using Meteor.  My experience with Meteor is that you can get up and running very quickly, and here you have a full database backing you, so you can build more fully featured apps.

IDE

I'm recommending Cloud9 IDE, because you can use it on any of the library's computers without installing things, and you can keep working on your projects when you get home.

Showing off Our Work

I started creating a gallery where we can display our creations.  Don't laugh, it's still a rough concept.  :-)  But my idea is that each box could be an iframe with someone's creation in it.  I've put up my chat demo as an example.  If the gallery idea catches on, there's a lot that we could do with it.  Get in touch if you're interested in helping me build this out.  In particular I could use someone with some visual design prowess.

[Joe Fleming]

A good way to handle getting started might be collectively (probably as small teams) building some project boilerplates. 

For example, maybe we build some static site boilerplates with Gulp, Webkit, Grunt, Broccoli, etc to get up and running. Then we expand and add things like React, Angular, etc, adding some pre-compilation (Less, Sass), packaging (Webkit, rjs, browserify, etc), add in a node server (Express, Hapi, Sails, etc), add a data store of some kind (Mongo, Postgres, MySQL, Redis, etc), authentication (Passport, Hapi auth, etc).... and just keep laying down a foundation.

That way, everyone will end up with a nice starting point, and they'll now how they got there and be able to build off of it, or even replace tools if something isn't to their liking. Once people know how the parts work together and have a nice starting point, they can build a project up from there.

And having a gallery and a time for people to demo what they built/are building is a great idea.

[Brandon Mason]

Joe,

That's exactly what I am thinking.  If you come across good boilerplates that we can use, please post them here!

Thanks,

Brandon

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[Brandon Mason]

Ah, you mean home growing them.  Yeah, absolutely.  I think it's going to be more of an intermediate-advanced activity, and we'll need to have something else that's engaging for those who are just getting started.  I can get my jQuery platform ready for that purpose.

[Joe Fleming]

I think rolling our own is part of the learning process, honestly. You get to see how all the pieces fit together and you learn a lot in the process, even if the end result is crap and you end up using something else.

If you work in small groups, and each group gets a little hand holding, either from someone with experience or via a general set of guidelines/tasks, then everyone can participate, ask questions, research and learn.

[Brandon Mason]

Hmm... what do you think about having a goal for what the boilerplate should allow you to create?

Like if I say I want:

• A default page layout in CSS
• A stage to display images on
• A tutorial for how to swap out the images on button clicks

That seems like a clear objective, but it could be implemented any number of ways.

Maybe we can just start with a list of ideas that would be good starter projects.  Alex Kremer started a list here.  It's in wiki form so we can add to it.

[Brad Westfall]

I agree, rolling anything on your own even if that wheel has been made teaches a lot

Brad Westfall
AZPixels
c: 480.217.4165
@bradwestfall

[Brandon Mason]

Cool.  I would love to have your input as well Brad.  You can't make a complete product with Javascript alone (well, let's not go there), so these tutorials and boilerplates are going to have to get people started on HTML/CSS as well.  I know you've created some great materials for teaching the fundamentals, and I'd love to integrate that.

[Brad Westfall]

Sounds good, sounds like we need to grab luch

Brad Westfall
AZPixels
c: 480.217.4165
@bradwestfall

[Joe Fleming]

That's a good, easy set of goals for a project (and the wiki has some great ideas too). 

I was looking at it as more of starting from a build system which people could use to put a project together. That way, they could choose to add pre-compilation (LESS, Sass), transpilation (ES6, Coffeescript), linting/hinting, minification, etc, as well as creating a static server (even with live reload) for working with. They could pick the things they want to build their project in and create their build system, then use it to make their project(s).

[Brandon Mason]

I was playing around with my jQuery intro sandbox... and converting that to a story-building tutorial.  I wonder how much value it has over something like Khan Academy.  Should we be building out really basic tutorials like this, when there's better ones already out there?

It seems like the main barrier that people hit is getting into a "real" project.  Honestly, I feel like Meteor is huge bang for buck.  It's a pre-assembled stack, low learning curve, well documented, and will let you build cutting edge apps.

But I think when it comes to teaching the fundamentals of HTML/CSS/Javascript, we need to cut out all the fancy tools and just edit the raw stuff.  So that's where my jQuery tutorial comes in.

Thoughts?

Any feedback from newer members?  Is story telling interesting to you?  Would you rather build a calculator or something along those lines?

[Nathan Atkinson]

I would love to take part in a project.  I won't be able to attend this Wednesday but I'm open to meeting with a project group outside of the normal meet-up if needed.