I’m starting yet another class this week. This time, the topic will be other programming languages. Up until this point in my college career with UMUC, we have only used Java. While Java is quite powerful and can run pretty much everywhere, it is certainly not user friendly. I certainly wouldn’t use it for any trivial project. Or really any project where I can avoid it. I was hoping that we would learn contemporary languages like Go, Scala, or Clojure....

I’ve been thinking a lot about authentication for my library website, Bibliophilium. It started out with do I need any? And moved to, how should I manage it? To how far do I want to take this? In Rails development, there is a golden standard library for authentication. It’s called Omniauth [https://github.com/intridea/omniauth]. Everyone seems to use it. It integrates with other services like Facebook and Twitter allowing signin from them through OAuth....

In my data structures class, we’ve been talking about things like Linked Lists and Search Trees. One thing that I’ve noticed in common with most of these structures is that they’re made up of nodes. A node is just a simple way to store data. In a linked list, a node will also store a reference to the next node. In a tree structure, it will store references to its parent node, as well as child nodes one to the left and one to the right....

I’m blogging at you this week from Louisville, KY where I’m in town for the wedding of my oldest and closest friend. I also started my next class for my Computer Science degree. It’s a Data Structures and Algorithms class. This type of class has been talked up all over the Internet as the most important class in a computer science degree. I’ll update you all my thoughts on the class as it goes....

I found a great group of people this week at Unallocated Space [unallocatedspace.org]! I went to their weekly web dev night. I had a great time learning how to build a Drupal module. I can’t wait to return next week.

With the holiday weekend last weekend, I was finally able to program some on Bibliophilium which as you may recall is the library managing site that I’m working on. I spent most of the weekend getting logins working and getting the hosting to work. I feel so behind because I don’t work with heroku [heroku.com] on a regular basis. There is quite literally nothing to look at on the staging site [http://bibliophilium-staging....

UPDATE (5/18/2015): Here are my config files [https://github.com/magikid/linuxconfigfiles] I’ve talked before [http://blog.christopherjones.us/2015/04/08/tools/] about how my favorite programming editor is Sublime Text. Just because I have a favorite though doesn’t mean that I always get to use it. Today’s post is about my second favorite text editor. Vim is my backup text editor. I like it because it’s installed everywhere its commands are very powerful it’s crazy customizable and the plugins To the first point, vim is always installed when I first log into a new terminal....

This weeks article is going to be about a blog that I consider to be a mentor. That blog is Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots [https://robots.thoughtbot.com]. It is written by different people at the company thoughtbot [https://thoughtbot.com/]. I really like this blog. Out of all of the resources that I have on the internet for programming, I turn to it first. They develop mainly in Ruby on Rails which is what I mainly use too....

At work, I hang out in a chat room with other programmers. We mainly tell bad jokes all day but I was tipped off to a really fun programming exercise game. It’s called Elevator Saga [http://play.elevatorsaga.com/]. The point of the game is to program a set of elevators to efficiently go from floor to floor, picking up and dropping off passengers. And if you’re wondering how exactly you program an elevator, the designers have created an API [http://play....

I’ve learned a lot about programming over the years. I started learning programming with HTML which is the language of the web. Through the years, I have found a bunch of great resources for learning. This post is dedicated to my current sources of information. My favorite blog that I read these days is called Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots [https://robots.thoughtbot.com/]. It’s written by a company of programmers. They work Monday thru Thursday and help others on Friday....