Clearing out the old bookmarks

Just cleaned out my Chrome bookmarks.
I'm sure I could get rid of a lot more but I went from 1,193 to 516 bookmarks.

You can see the number of bookmarks you have in Chrome by visiting this link:
https://chrome.google.com/sync

First I made a copy of my current bookmarks by exporting to HTML. Then I set about deleting old and duplicate bookmarks. I wanted to reorganize things, so I have as few top level folders as possible.

Going horizontally across the top I have:
Main | Learning | Activities | Important | Other

Going vertically down into the Main bookmarks:
The idea was to pull out single blogs, subreddits, and people I follow on Twitter. This way I can "open all" on the Main bookmark folder and get the stuff I actually want to read without trying to look at the entirety of Reddit and Twitter.

I also made folders for Sometimes and Rarely. These are the bookmarks I want to visit but don't need or want to see them every day.

Main:
►Daily—————
     Site 1

     Site 2

     Site 3

     ...

►Blogs—————
     Blog 1

     Blog 2

     Blog 3

     ...

►Reddits—————
     Subreddit 1

     Subreddit 2

     Subreddit 3

     ...

►Twitters—————
     @twitter 1

     @twitter 2

     @twitter 3

     ...

►Sometime (for links I use once in a while)
►Rarely (for links I rarely open)

We'll see how the new set up goes. It's a lot tighter than my previous set up. Things were getting out of hand. Either way, it's nice to clean out the bookmarks once in a while.


I found these vertical and horizontal separators while I was working through the bookmarks:

https://separator.mayastudios.com/index.php?t=horz

Ended up just using empty folders for separators but I don't know why Chrome doesn't have that feature built in.

Revisiting Vim

I recently started a new job and vi is the editor of choice. The structure of the project is quite complex and being able to quickly navigate and edit related files is really important.

Watching the lead developer code using vi was eye opening to say the least.

In December of 2013 I played around with vi, vim, and gvim. I probably spent a week or two messing around trying to make it look pretty and run on Windows.

I eventually gave up because I was wasting a lot of time and not getting any real work done. I abandoned vi and ended up with Jetbrains editors PyCharm and PhpStorm.

I feel that it is key to my programming career to get up to speed with vim so my next series of blog posts will be about Revisiting Vim.

My plan is to do all the blog editing in Vim and hopefully be able to use it as my primary editor.

For starters I pretty much know:

i = insert

hjkl = movement

:q = quit

:w = write

esc = exit insert

I aware of more commands but the point is I am starting at pretty much the beginning.

Lets see how this goes.

--StevenKW

Treehouse 14 Day Trial (Day 3)

Today I finished off  the How to Make a Website course. It's the first course in the Front End Web Development track.

It was really well done. It took me approximately 10 hours to complete. I have taken 2 extension courses and worked through an HTML & CSS book. I still learned quite a bit. The course was well presented and fairly easy to follow along with.

One nice thing is that after you complete a course the teacher will email you to encourage you. I normally turn off extra emails but it is actually nice to receive these congratulations from your teachers even if they are automatically generated. Since you are watching the videos you start to get to know the instructors and it's nice to receive a pat on the back from them.

I was just starting the next course in the track. It's called CSS Foundations. During the first video he mentioned that if you wanted a more in-depth look at HTML you could first complete the basic HTML course.

I felt like I had this information covered so I was happy to see you can skip through the content and quickly do the quiz and code challenges. I don't recommend doing this but it is nice that they don't force you through content that you already have a handle on.

They also have a slider you can bump up to increase (or decrease) the playback speed of the video. The slider goes from sleepwalker @ 50% to chipmonk @ 200% in 25% increments. It's pretty handy if you need it.

Here is my referral code for 50% off your first month.
50% off at Treehouse Learn how to build websites & apps, write code or start a business.

You can also get 14 days for free here:
https://teamtreehouse.com/subscribe/plans

Treehouse 14 Day Trial (Day 2)

So today I went through and tried a sample of different content. Treehouse has a cool "ring" graphic that represents the different content that you have completed.

New subjects show up as different colors. For example here is somebody that has studied HTML and CSS

And here is my ring with some added content.

It's a pretty cool shorthand to see what the other users are into.

I also tried the "Treehouse Club" JavaScript content. This content is targeted at kids 9-14. Interestingly it seems to be less hand holdy than the regular content. I guess kids have less to unlearn and don't require long explanations for things. Just get in there and play with the code was the feeling I was getting. The teacher covered a lot of ground in a short amount of time. It was a pretty nice overview.

That's it for day 2.

Treehouse 14 Day Trial (Day 1)

I originally found out about Treehouse by watching the Foundation 14 episode with Ryan Carson. It sounded like a great idea but I wasn't ready to jump in just yet.

I have done some other online and classroom training and I wanted to see how Treehouse compares.

I started with the "Front End Development" track. This would be a good introduction to the site and let me practice my HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

So far I really like it. The sessions are quick and bite sized. You get a short video instruction, sometimes a quick quiz, and an opportunity to try out the code and submit it for correctness.

They also have a built in IDE called "Workspaces" that lets you save your work as you follow along. You can use this if you don't yet have a favorite IDE or text editor.

I'll try to check in each day and give an update and see how I like the service at the end of the 14 days.

Here is my referral code for 50% off your first month.
50% off at Treehouse Learn how to build websites & apps, write code or start a business.

You can also get 14 days for free here:
https://teamtreehouse.com/subscribe/plans

AngularJS Fundamentals In 60-ish Minutes

Im currently working through my JavaScript and found this video and courseware on AngularJS.

Video

Here is the course on Udemy. It's currently discounted 59%.

Here's the link:

AngularJS JumpStart with Dan Wahlin

Finally Finished Exercise 37

I am a little angry at Zed for dumping me off in the deep end.

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex37.html

Exercise 37 has you look up 31 keywords. Explain how they are used, and then write a little code demonstrating how it works. That's a lot of work and maybe 13 of those keywords I never encountered nor were they explained in the book. It was like good luck figuring this stuff out.

At first I was thinking hey this is great I'll go look all this stuff up and really learn a lot. I did learn a lot. I'm glad I went through it. But by the time I finished the exercise I was a little ticked off. :)

I did find that I got a lot of good information out of the following places.

Python For Kids: A lot of really clear examples. The only problem is they don't go into some of the more advanced stuff.

Real Python: Really well presented information on the topics. Explanations and examples from this book is what got me a little irritated with Zed for leaving me out in the weeds.

Writing Idiomatic Python: Again some really great and well thought out examples to help get your head around the correct way to write Python. Not everything was covered in this book but what I did find was very helpful.

The main websites I used were:
TutorialsPoint
The Official Python Documentation
The Official Python Tutorial

Also pydoc keyword in a terminal window had a lot to offer.

Man I hope exercise 38 is a little more forgiving.
--Steve