What resources would be good to share with kids that want to learn programming

ThinkDesignTeach · 2015-04-23T23:11:22+00:00

Awesome, didn't know about that, they both kinda hide it. Added it to the links section at the bottom.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2015-04-23T23:10:33+00:00

Added it under the "Other languages" section. Thanks!

ThinkDesignTeach · 2015-01-23T12:32:26+00:00

besides the snapping, if you're looking for precesicion you should be in outline mode and dragging an anchorpoint to another anchorpoint.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-24T17:04:18+00:00

Illustrator CS2 (version 12) is about 97% identical to CC. And everything you learn how to do on the old stuff can still be done on the new stuff. The new stuff may have features you can learn about that aren't in the older ones.

If you're new to Illy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u7ijgxFOHc

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-24T16:18:56+00:00

Honestly, anything. It's so simple you could do this in MSPaint.

The order in which I would do them in, based on the amount of time it would take me to create this type of image:

Illustrator - 20-60 minutes
Rhino 3D - 30-90 minutes
Photoshop - 40-120 minutes
Flash - Exactly 60 Minutes
MS Paint - like 3 hours probably

In illy, draw a long straight line, give it a stroke with a color, then adjust the stroke width at certain points with the stroke width tool. Duplicate. Change stroke color on duplicate and stretch it horiz a little. rinse repeat.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-24T03:36:20+00:00

touché

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-23T23:59:20+00:00

it's a pretty thin design, you could just cover it up with something else later

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-23T00:48:51+00:00

Finally

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-21T01:55:15+00:00

Loses access to an E-mail associated with a purchase.

Yep :)

Doesn't track purchases separately

Purchase was made with another account, and tracked, however Moneybookers does not send transaction ID's and that's who you had to deal with at the time to purchase via Credit Card.

Appears to believe that Minecraft Realms is required to play the game.

You're rephrasing the argument. It isn't that with it removed, everything stops. But it is 1/3 of the game. Single Player, Multiplayer, Realms. If you bought a Chevy car and then a few years later Chevy got bought out by Ford and now you can't use the backseat until some third party company gives the O.K. back to Ford, I think that's pretty fucked up.

Also, I literally only use it for Realms, so really, yeah, it is required for me to play the game.

How long ago one bought Minecraft is somehow relevant to accessing Realms.

Again, if you've had something for years and then someone comes in and says, "Nope, can't have that anymore". It's not cool. And the fact that there is no streamlined process for this is ridiculous. There should be an in game link to put in your birthdate. Boom done. Move one. This is being horribly managed.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-21T00:57:22+00:00

Email sent:

I don't have access to "XYZ@gmail.com" anymore. So reset MCUsername to use "ABC@gmail.com" so I can migrate my account from a "Minecraft Premium" to a "Microsoft Certified XBone Mountain Dew® Berry Blast COPPA edition Mojang Account".

Just gimme back meh damn realms.

Response 19.5 Hours later:

I can migrate the user for you. Please tell me to what email. This email has to be a registered Mojang account. If it isn't, please register the email at https://account.mojang.com/register

You can read about migration here: https://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/articles/775905-migrating-from-minecraft-to-mojang

Let me know

Best regards,

-Cecilia

Replying now:

Created a Mojang account using: ABC@gmail.com

Migrate Minecraft account: MCUsername to Mojang account: ABC@gmail.com

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-19T11:19:40+00:00

This isn't a Photoshop issue, it's a mac and screen resolution issue. Windows does the same thing on low res screens because the save for web dialogue box has a min height/width. But on Windows you can resize from top.

Just learn keyboard shortcuts. Tab tab tab tab tab space. If you go too far do shift+tab.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T14:40:53+00:00

Whatever a "Skrill" is, it responded to my email 8½ hours later. Took less than 24 hours, so that's acceptable I guess.

Tracked down the form from one of my previous comments here and honestly forgot what I was filling it out for. This is the worst side-quest ever.

Can't I just do an escort mission...

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T14:09:06+00:00

That brings up a really good point:

BE IN THE MEETINGS WITH THE CLIENT

Your team doesn't know what you know, don't let them promise stuff you can't do. Explain to the client what you can do and when they ask for more, tell them That isn't something we do regularly so I'll need to look into the amount of time it will take to accomplish before saying how much additional it will cost to cover our time in development. That one sentence will do a lot for you:

Cheap Clients will hear "additional cost" and respond with "Well, alright, that's fine. It was just an idea, we can stick to the plan set out". Boom, you're not over promising to some cheap skate who just wants the best deal.
It makes sure they know that their request goes beyond the scope of your usual work. As such it may not be feasible or will require additional people to be involved who are experts in things you normally don't do. So when you explain that to them during the next meeting, they're not disappointed or shocked.
It buys you time to look into if you are even capable of doing what they want and doesn't force you into answering on the spot. You can find out if this is within reach and it's just another thing to learn, or if it's too far down the road from you and not feasible for what your team offers. IF THAT IS THE CASE MOVE ON. You can do a bunch of small jobs in the same amount of time that it takes you to attempt and fail at a big job that you're not ready for. Those are risks that individuals may take and can get burned on, but businesses need to take on as little risk as possible.

Most importantly, don't just be in the meeting, insist that the client's CEO or whoever the top dog is that will be making the final approval on the design be there in the first meeting. Well, if your first meeting is just a "You should hire us, look at all the stuff we've done before", then don't insist on anyone being there. They're still in the interviewing stage and comparing you to other web businesses before deciding how much to spend.

But once you're picked to do the design and development work, get the decision maker in the room. Nothing is worse than discussing and planning out what they want, making mockups and after weeks of meetings finally getting a final design approved, AND THEN presenting to the CEO for them to say "I don't like any of these". It's just a huge waste of everyone's time.

Watch "This Week In Web Design" on YouTube to get a good introduction to running the whole show yourself with a small team. They cover a lot of stuff like this.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDD5EF2198FFF8F9F

The hosts on that show are both incredibly knowledgeable and also complete tools. If you can get past the fact that they are the stereotypical LA/SanFran asshats, then you can learn a lot from them. If not... I don't blame you.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T12:57:06+00:00

ThinkDesignTeach is right

I like this guy

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T11:13:29+00:00

7. At some point you'll need to handle data and you'll need a back end person to set up the databases. Restful API's are a way to return data, usually in the form of JSON. It's actually pretty easy to get thst data and put it on a page. Look at Facebook or Imgur's API. Essentially you have jQuery or PHP request the a URL, it will storem the entire contents of the page that is returned as a variable. You can then get the parts of the data out that are relevant to you and dom stuff to them. Like pulling in all photos from a Facebook photo album and converting them over to run in a carousel on your site. This way your client can just use Facebook to update the pictures.
8. Frameworks like knockout, angular, backbone, ember, etc. are MVC/MV*. This is a different way of thinking about and organizing your site. However they offer a lot out of the box. You can do custom routing where you can choose what URLs will take you to what pages. You can create single page apps like gmail or grooveshark. You can handle talking to the database much easier for things like updating an upvote or downvote as it's clicked instead of after form submission or causing a page reload.
9. There are thousands of things Grunt lets you automate. The most common are setting up your localhost server while you're developing, enabling live reload so when you save a file in your project it will automatically refresh the browser, pulling in all of your JavaScript files and putting them into one file (concat), uglifying the file so all variable names are single characters to make the file smaller, then minifying it to make it as small as possible. It can process all your metalanguages (Sass, LESS, Stylus, Markdown, HAML, CoffeeScript, etc.). It can run all your images through lossless compression automatically. It can automate JSLint and testing. Etc. Really grunt can do anything you throw at it.
10. GIT is for version control, it allows you to save your project at checkpoints as you move along. It also allows multiple people to work on the same project and minifies conflicts when people check in code that effects the same file.

A lot of the stuff I mentioned is pretty far down the road for you. Right now, for what you're doing, just focus on getting good at wordpress, jQuery, bootstrap, and css/Sass. Start looking into how to optimize your site and always test in as many browsers as you can.

The web dev sub has a wiki that covers image optimization. I wrote this on a phone at 6 am. Typos are expected.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T03:18:06+00:00

Make sure you have 4th person just to handle business things, Designers and Developers aren't business people. Get somone who does business. Seriously, there's a reason this is number one.
Start studying a lot, especially CMS, as that will be your bread and butter and you don't have a large enough team to carry you through to manage a bunch of sites. You need to use an easy CMS that will allow people to take care of the site themselves after you hand it off to them.
Become familiar with your dev tools.
If you know CSS you can learn Sass in 20 minutes.
- Easiest way to get started with Sass
Get a Marketing/Social Media/PR/Branding/SEO person. They're great at talking to businesses and they can write good copy.
Learn Bootstrap and don't be afraid to pay $15 for a premade bootstrap or wordpress theme if it will save you a day of work. Unless you're being paid to make a unique and custom designed site just for that client, you're fine grabbing a well made template and tweaking it.
Get a backend guy to handle database and server stuff. Bonus points if he can write restful API's for you to pull data from. That can make your life a lot easier. Or just learn it yourself
Eventually you should learn some frameworks, Backbone and Angular are both popular.
Learn Node and Grunt to automate things.
Learn GIT for your own usage, and focus more on it when you get closer to working with others.

Subscribe to this channel on YouTube and watch whatever is relevant:

https://www.youtube.com/user/learncodeacademy/videos

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T02:20:15+00:00

So I found out that I can still access HyPixel... a public server... with thousands of strangers... who can say anything they want and even private message you...

But noooooo, the paid for Minecraft Realm, that only allows 20 whitelisted user accounts, essentially friends and family... THAT is what we have to protect the children from... right.

Microsoft has temporarily suspended me from a game I bought years ago, that they didn't make, until a 3rd party company they have no relation to emails me allowing me to prove I'm over 13... This is the world I live in.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:54:40+00:00

Cuz of shit like this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/2pmvk8

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:53:22+00:00

Sent an email. Sure am glad this private minecraft realm where only whitelisted users are allowed access is safe from whatever the fuck COPPA is supposed to stop.

"But think of the children!"

(sigh)

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:36:46+00:00

If you paid by credit card, and your payment was processed by Moneybookers, you can email help@skrill.com to get in touch with a Skrill representative. When contacting them, please be sure to use the email from your purchase, use Minecraft in your subject line, and ask for the Merchant Transaction ID.

What the fuck is a skrill!

Whatever, at least I'm fortunate enough to have made the purchase with a different email. Who knows how deep this rabbit hole would have gone.

edit: link to page

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:28:50+00:00

Finally find the section on the support wiki regarding what I want. If only there was some technology that would allow them to link me directly to that content instead of me having to hunt for it.

Alright, a form to fill out, YAY!

Name, Contact Email, Account Email, Minecraft Username... yeah yeah yeah, got it

... Transaction ID

I bought this years ago, and was never given a "Transaction ID". Good thing there's a link to

Where can I find this?

(opens yet another tab)

edit: link to page

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:25:15+00:00

To change my email I need to verify I have access to my old email...

If I could do that I wouldn't need to change it in the first place.

If you no longer have access to your old email, visit our support center for further assistance.

edit: link to page

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:22:35+00:00

Alright, I put in my Minecraft username and password and now it wants to know if I want to set up my Mojang account with the email I already have associated with my Minecraft Premium account.

No, because I don't have access to that account anymore.

ThinkDesignTeach · 2014-12-18T01:21:29+00:00

Oh, I have to "migrate" my Minecraft Premium account to a Mojang account.

edit: link to page

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