Michelle Minkoff - Latest Comments

Re: How to “Group By” in Excel

Yosefi — Sat, 05 May 2012 08:29:45 -0000

how to group with bellow of it

Re: How to make a non-Flash intensity map in Fusion Tables

Albertgian55 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:44:47 -0000

Hello,
I can't upload the Gadget..
This is the error:
Unsupported feature: org.apache.shindig.common.xml.XmlException: The element type "meta" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "". At: (1325,5)

Re: AP and NICAR — they’re both my home

Jaehee — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:25:07 -0000

Hi Michelle, I love this blog entry. I know I only attended CAR conference and have very little hands on experience, I can pride myself for having knowledge on the topic and knowing the community to rely on. The field only there to grow and people in business are just tapping into the field and curious to find out more. Keep up the good work!

Re: Making the structured usable: Transform JSON into a CSV

ultraviolet — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:05:55 -0000

Excelent!! Very Useful

Re: A pilgramage to NY headquarters

Dan Nguyen — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:00:02 -0000

It's natural to feel inadequate...the Internet makes it easy to come in touch with people much better than you...but you have to use that to your advantage...let those people inspire, and copy where possible. Moreover, you'll find there are just as many people who are being impressed by you. Feeling inadequate can be a good thing, if it helps you stop being complacent, but don't let it hamper you. Easy words to say, I know...

I also just started dinking around in Backbone. I had set a goal to make a quick photo app this week (http://so.danwin.com/bigfaces/... and it has almost none of the features I wanted, but I learned a lot through trial and error. Frameworks are complex enough systems that sometimes it's just best to crank out a minimal product and circle back feeling refreshed.

Keep on trucking!

Re: How to combine multiple Fusion Tables into one map

Kate Golden — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:42:33 -0000

Ha ha! I posted that stackoverflow request (and then the comment after we figured it out). Good find, yes, that was indeed the problem. ;) Thanks again for the tutorial, Michelle.

Re: How to combine multiple Fusion Tables into one map

Michelle Minkoff — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:48:40 -0000

Kate: Hmmm....maybe this is your issue. (It's hard for me to know for certain.) If the content or "entry" area of your site's theme in wordpress has a background-color, this could override the actual map, except for a brief second when the map redraws, like when you zoom. You may have to change the CSS for the entry section of your Wordpress site. More here: http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Michelle Minkoff — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:43:36 -0000

That's a really great suggestion, Dino. I'll try applying that mentality to my side projects.

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Michelle Minkoff — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:43:06 -0000

Thanks! I got the same recommendation from a colleague, it's next on my list!

Re: How to combine multiple Fusion Tables into one map

Kate Golden — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 12:50:59 -0000

This is great - there are so few tutorials at this level. I just created one of these maps on my WordPress site using a couple of fusion tables — and they load up just fine together! that is cool.

Unfortunately, the basemap gmap doesn't load. Or rather it looks like it gets drawn but then disappears or is covered up (zooming in or out causes the basemap to flash visible for an instant). Any ideas on what the problem might be? Doesn't look like WP is stripping the code (a frequent problem).

The only thing I altered from the block above was the lat/long, the table IDs, and the maptype (I tried HYBRID and TERRAIN.

Thanks!

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:26:20 -0000

I'm not sure what language you're working in, but I love Martin Fowler's "Refactoring" for when you get stuck. http://j.mp/ylZ8JO

Re: A pilgramage to NY headquarters

gsamek — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:57:23 -0000

I've been in a funk like you described, scared of code and depressed at my rate of learning. Often I feel there is an overwhelming amount to learn (and I have a CS degree!). And my first job out of school felt like that a bit. In school everything I learned was theoretical but in the work place not many people were asking me for the Big O notation for an algorithm's speed, or asking me to write a sorting method from scratch. Version control? Integrated Development Environments? For christ sake I didn't even know how to run an application server like Tomcat or even Apache!

Of all the comments you got from people I tend to think the following is the best:

“Asking questions about how every line works is an excellent trait for a technologist. But sometimes it’s enough to grasp the big picture, and let the rest come.”

I think you can say it more succinctly, sometimes you can just plow forward without knowing something. It's tempting to go deep on a subject when it actually makes more sense to learn a little about a lot of stuff and deepen your knowledge over time. Reminds me of seeing a novice musician perform, instead of gracefully flowing over their mistakes they get stuck and repeat a phrase until they get it right. If they had just let it go, likely they would have been the only one that noticed.

One other thought, tackle a side project that is tiny but very useful and complete it. People need to complete stuff. Are you doing a search and replace a lot? Learn how to use a command line tool like sed/awk/grep/perl to make it faster/easier. When you have 5 half finished projects it's stressful. When you have one 2 hour project that you see through to the finish, you feel happy. If it's useful to you, you feel good everyday and you feel like a real hacker.

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Dino — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:26:59 -0000

Best thing to do when you've run into a dead end is to get a spare set of eyes to look at it. Process of explaining what the problem is will often enough solve the issue by illuminating something you're tunnel-visioned on. Second strategy is to take a break and let the problem stew in the ye olde braine.

But, otherwise, there are some of us who at times find spaghetti code (with occasionally repeating blocks) acceptable in a rapid prototype. In a freeformed rapid prototype, where developers are the glue that holds pieces together, you can't always anticipate which direction the code will go.

A rapid prototype might generate a surprising level of interest mid-development,
and it will get launched against your will and relaunched several times before you can respond to its needs. I'm usually told to "cauterize wounds and ship it" since it's my nature to over-complicate code for way too long.

This might be a good thing - it helps you prioritize future development correctly. It's only after you launch the prototype that you will run into its quirks and discover what needs will different users have for it. At that point, you can cycle back and intelligently redesign the internal guts to work the right way.

Re: Adventures in rebooting my coding practice

onyxfish — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:46:29 -0000

Joe Germuska : The book basically lays out what you just said. Readable code is almost always about good variable naming and sensible organization. I've never once read a great piece of code and thought, "Wow, that made great use of comments." I have frequently thought, "Wow, that code was so good it didn't need any comments." Of course that's not to say they are never useful--they are especially necessary when dealing with eccentricities of your dependencies. Frequently it's other people's code that's ugly and you just have to document how you made it work. I like Code Complete because it codifies a lot of these ideas into digestible units of understanding.

Re: Adventures in rebooting my coding practice

Joe Germuska — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:59:00 -0000

I'm not sure what Chris had in mind for vetoing #6, although maybe it's something from "Code Complete" — but I'll generally echo the sentiment. You can write your code so that it's self documenting, by using meaningful variable names and extracting into a well-named functions anything which would otherwise get a comment. Comments have their uses, but they can also be clutter.

Regarding #7, absolutely. I hope by now you've found "Code Like a Pythonista" and PEP 8. I don't know the equivalents in other languages off the top of my head, but they must be out there.

Happy new year!

Re: Adventures in rebooting my coding practice

onyxfish — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 08:34:14 -0000

Michelle, it sounds like a lot of what your learning is time & stress management, which is indeed a hard thing to learn on your feet. As Brian likes to say, newsrooms are a crucible. I very nearly washed out of Tribapps in the first week when I realized the pace I needed to maintain. I think you'll find that this is something that has more to do with your confidence in your own estimates and ability to say "no" then the idiosyncrasies of the place. Respect your own ability to plan and make sure other's are listening, not just making requests.

As to the technical struggles you're having--there comes a point in every hacker's life where ad hoc stops being supportable. A lot of good abstraction patterns can be learned from reading other people's code and applying what you see, but at a certain point it can really help you're thinking to crystallize if you sit down and read an expert on the subject.

If you haven't I would strongly recommend you pick up Code Complete (http://www.amazon.com/Code-Com... ), by Steve McConnell. It's really *the* book on programming at the small scale and taught me innumerable things about breaking my code up into manageable pieces. It's also extremely readable and probably won't take you a lot of time to start putting the lessons to work. I know it can be kind of lame to recommend a book when you're already probably kicking way too many hours into your work, but I really think this is a worthwhile investment.

Lastly, I'll note that writing manageable code doesn't end at the small scale, you're going to run into several of these "ridges" in your programming career where things get inexplicably harder and it's usually because you need a new set of abstractions in your toolkit. I think I've been through 3 distinct ones, so when you get to the next one (which you will) let me know and I'll have another book for you. :-)

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Lisa Williams — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 17:05:13 -0000

Hey, Richard -- Those links are really useful. Code conventions are the kind of thing I'm looking to learn.

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

John Campbell — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:25:41 -0000

Habits are important. I got into one at Unisys that is generally ridiculed by more serious programmers, but I find it works for me. Worlds away from 'big systems,' I did no ground-up coding then, but specialized in tables of Perl regular expressions to be applied to incoming wire copy. This was concentrated arcana, and it would have to be turned over to a journalist customer who would maintain it after the install. My self-imposed constraint was to comment EVERY LINE of code, whether it seemed necessary or not. I carried that over to stand-alone code at the newspaper, though I can't say I stuck with it on every project. Without that constraint -- leaving it up to my own judgment in the heat of the moment -- I found it way too tempting to push on with the code, figuring this or that passage was self-explanatory or I'd comment it later. Later, of course, there'd be another fire to put out, and later still, I'd be staring at a block of totally uncommented code. So better to live with the 60 silly comments than to do without the 40 that will save the day later.

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Ben Welsh — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:12:43 -0000

It didn't click for me until I saw James Bennett speak at DjangoCon in 2008. This talk, literally, changed my life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Michelle Minkoff — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:39:51 -0000

You are fantastic! Skimmed all of these, and plan to go deeper soon. Even knowing there is a way to conquer this is making me feel so much better.

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Michelle Minkoff — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:38:10 -0000

Oh, I don't think anyone is really "behind" anyone else -- we've all got a ton to learn. I don't ay it enough, but I really enjoy the resources you post, and following your journety.

Even really experienced people tell me they remain newbies, as the tools continue to change rapidly.

I totally hear you on this. The one suggestion I would make, which it sounds like you're already doing, is pay attention to this now. Don't be me, sitting at my desk staring at 1200 lines of code, and having to use a find command to get to any part I need to update.

I wish I had developed better habits in this area, so I don't have to unlearn them. Countless people told me this, but did I listen? Not so much.

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Richard Cornish — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 03:03:12 -0000

Combing through my Delicious links, here are the ones that might help you write bigger applications. My apps could be written with jQuery and some DOM manipulation, and never needed to use patterns, but sounds like you're doing bigger work. I hope these help.

JavaScript inheritance by example
Simple example on using constructors to make and duplicate objects. Written by former Yahoo developer
http://www.klauskomenda.com/co...

Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners
Covers just about all patterns in writing modular JavaScript. Everyone seems to like Crockford's module pattern, which creates private and public members. Everything is written to basically avoid function/variable clashes in the namespace.
http://addyosmani.com/resource...

JavaScript Garden
Covers the "quirkier" parts of the language. Good to get perspective on the shortcomings of JavaScript.
http://bonsaiden.github.com/Ja...

Douglas Crockford's code conventions
The "father" of JavaScript's way of doing things. Most I agree with, some not. Some of the shorthand in the name of optimization creates too much obfuscation, but a nice resource to have.
http://javascript.crockford.co...

Re: Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Lisa Williams — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 02:01:29 -0000

I'm pretty far behind you, but I'm really interested to hear what you learn on this front. Since I'm a novice, I'm still trying to learn conventions about things like indentation and commenting. I admit, it's been hard to find resources on that. There seem to be plenty of style guides and grammar tutorials for written English, but I haven't really run into something that will help me on that level with my code.

Re: Making the structured usable: Transform JSON into a CSV

Melfromalice — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:50:28 -0000

thank you!

Re: http://michelleskidneyadventures.tumblr.com/post/12442277768

Arounsav — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:27:25 -0000

excellent news!!!!!! and, coincidentally, just in time for the 2011 Absurbly-Never-Ending-Slew-of-Holiday-Parties-a-thon-a-rama