Augusta Polyglot Group

We are cancelling the meeting tonight because of the storm. Our next meeting will be 3/19/2015. Stay safe and warm!

Survey

Would you be so kind and take a survey to help give feedback about the group? https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WH3MLDC

Boston Code Camp

Boston Code Camp is next Month on 3/21/2015. Last time we had over 8 people from our group attend! Let’s see if we can do it again! Contact me if you are interested and I will help coordinate.

We covered a lot of ground in our meeting this month. We learned how HTML, CSS, and Javascript all come together in Ionic. We also touched on how Ionic uses the Javascript framework Angular and even learned a little bit of MVC pattern that angular encourages. Finally, we learn first hand why mobile development is not for the faint of heart even if we have Ionic to help us along.

Due to overwhelming excitement, we will be continuing our adventures into Ionic and mobile next month. Be sure to check out our GitHub Ionic repository to get the latest files.

We also picked up Microsoft as a sponsor this month and raffled off a free e-book! We will have another e-book to raffle off next month so see you there!

Have you ever spent hours or even days trying to set up a development environment? It can be painful to make sure everything is installed, plays nice together, and on your path.

This month we learned how to use Vagrant so we only have to go through that pain once (or even better, have some one else go through the pain for us). Using Vagrant and VirtualBox we set up a repeatable environment that starts up a virtual machine with python installed with one command:vagrant up. You can check out the code sample at https://github.com/Augusta-Polyglot/vagrant-intro.

We will be using Vagrant for all our future meetings so that we don’t all have to go through the process of setting up complex environments. Instead we will only have to make a quick call to vagrant up and we will be off coding! (Don’t worry knowing Vagrant won’t be a requirement).

At our next meeting will be learning Ionic to build a mobile phone app. A Vagrantfile will be provided so we don’t have to worry about Ionic’s complex setup and dependencies. See you there and Happy Holidays!

This past Saturday was Boston Code Camp 22 and a we had a great turn out from our group at the Code Camp. We manage to send several car fulls to Boston for the day.

There were a lot of great talks and great people at the Conference. Thanks to the organizers and sponsors for putting it on!

We had another good turn out at the meeting in November with quite a few new faces. One of the new faces was a seventh grader and he brought a lot of enthusiasm for learning Python.

We finished up our Python Classes with an intro to the Tkinter UI framework. Using the tkinter framework we added a simple UI on top of our log parsing applications we built in previous meetings.

You can find the challenges and some of the solutions at https://github.com/Augusta-Polyglot/Python-intro.

We have come a long way since one of the second meeting sitting on the floor of Barns & Noble with spotty internet. At this meeting the group graduated to our own space with solid internet connection and a large conference table!

This week we used the Python skills we learned last week and worked through some challenges that started simple and got, well, more challenging. The end goal was to parse the server log files and find out where the attacks where coming from. We all had a blast breaking into small groups and trying our hand at the problems.

You can find the challenges and some of the solutions at https://github.com/Augusta-Polyglot/Python-intro.

At this meeting we learned the basics of Python by walking through a script that was designed to parse Apache server logs. Our resident security expert got the log files from his honeypot server he has set up. A Honeypot server is a decoy server used to detect malicious attacks. The various attacks on the honeypot server are then analyzed to prevent attacks before they hit the live servers.

We had success learning the basics of Python (we even had some members write their first lines of code!) and the group decided that we should do a more in depth Log parsing example with Python next meeting. You can find the sample files we used at our Github page.

At our second meeting we doubled our attendance! The enthusiasm from the group was great. We got some good feedback on our hands on approach to the meetings. And this week everyone walked away having created a website that was hosted on Github pages!

We started out the meeting with some tech talk then moved right into learning a bit about git. Only a few minutes after a quick introduction to distributed source control everyone had a clone of their first Github pages repository. We learned to use git command line and the GUI SourceTree. By the end of the meeting everyone had their own site hosted on Github. We even had someone attempt to make a site on their phone… unfortunately Github doesn’t support editing sites one the phone as of now. It was a fun exercise regardless.

For our first meeting we had a good turn out. We discuss goals for coming to the group and why we started the group. We had all skill levels from beginner to professional developers. Everyone was welcoming helpful. We even learned the origins of hello world programs.

Our first meeting was an introduction to Elixir. No-one in the group had much experience with functional programming but we went for it anyways. We spent the meeting following the introduction to installing, configuring our environment and finally playing with Elixir in it’s interactive shell. Everyone had a blast and we decided to do it again next month!