This week on the podcast, we sit down with Jess Lee, one of the co-founders of DEV, a social network where programmers come to learn, chat, and share ideas with a community of other coders. She explains her strange journey from working as a tour manager for Kidz Bop to building one of the fastest growing and most progressive online platforms for software developers.
Part 1
Paul and Sara chat about what language is best to choose as your first when you're just getting started on your journey as a programmer. Probably not Mathematica, but it's a neat one.
Jupyter Notebooks - an in-browser notebook for working with Python. You can write your words, have your code right next to it, and see how things play out. Or as Tom Butterworth put it on DEV.
"Jupyter Notebook is an interactive web application that interfaces with the iPython repl, allowing you to run structured but iterative Python scripts. It is the de facto choice for data scientists to rapidly prototype pipelines, visualize data, or perform ad hoc analysis."
Interview: Jess Lee
Jess Lee had some great perspectives to share on what it means to balance being an entrepreneur and a coder.
Issac Lyman kicked off a community project on DEV to create a book that would help guide readers through their first year in code. 15 contributors ended up writing chapters for the book, which is available for free here.
DEV is open source, and they have decided it can be a software platform other organizations can use to build their own communities. As Ben Halpern writes, "The future of our company will be based on delivering the DEV open-source software to power new standalone communities. We will work with a network of partners both inside and outside of the software ecosystem."
Part 2
We dig into D3.JS. Stack Overflow has a lot to teach folks on this subject.
What's the best way to make a d3.js visualization layout responsive?
Just don't ask about a good book for learning the subject!
And finally, what's the difference between d3.js and jQuery? It's a silly question with some interesting answers and a nice history of the web in the background.