Endless Hybrids

Category: Web development

  • Asking the essential questions about web development

    I have a dozen essential questions that anyone learning web development should think deeply about. But, first I want to talk about what makes for a good question. And how do questions help us focus on thinking to form the mental action steps needed to develop knowledge? When I was in college, my roommate and […]

  • Why did I learn to code?

    I never expected to ever teach programming or to even make a living as a software developer. It was the furthest thing from my mind as an English major in college. Even as I was learning about web technologies, I still thought coding was beyond my reach. Coding, in my mind then, belonged to the […]

  • Welcome to DCI 110

    Here’s a bit of the opening that I’m telling to this year’s DCI 110 class. Obviously, this course is going to be very different from how I would teach an in-person course. But I’ve been working all summer on preparing this virtual experience for you. I’m very excited about teaching this way, and I hope […]

  • The No Code Movement

    The no code movement views technological advances in software and artificial intelligence (AI) as opportunities for promoting user-friendly interfaces as alternatives for hand-coded programming. That sounds great! Well designed tools allow people to focus on getting things done with software rather than being concerned with the details of coding. But what if the tool is […]

  • Learn JavaScript by Backwards Design

    The focus on learning syntax of a programming language is one of my fundamental problems with the method that programming is often taught. I’m going to talk about an approach that works backwards from the desired result. This approach describes how to structure a course based not on the content you want to cover but […]

  • What is GitHub?

    GitHub has become a key tool in not only my web development process but also in my life and work. You definitely don’t need GitHub in order to create web sites, but it can really help you stay organized and productive. GitHub, as the name suggests, is based on what was once a little-known set […]

  • Task list for initial prototype implementation

    #4 in a series What do you need to do? The prototype shows you what you need to do. You then need to convert that into a list of tasks that you need to accomplish. You can write the list as any kind of document. Don’t get stuck on figuring out the most fantastic task […]

  • GitHub as a Tool for Teams

    Notes for DCI 190: Shenandoah, a studio course on online literary magazine design. GitHub, based on the open source tool git, most often functions as a version control system. (There are several other similar tools based on git, such as GitLab and Bitbucket.) I tend to prefer GitHub, though the others are also very good […]

  • On SEO

    I don’t think much anymore about SEO (i.e., optimizing my content and site for search engines). For those who do (and there are good reasons for doing so if you’re trying to build an audience), then Google’s Webmaster site has posted a good article about Google’s ‘core updates’.

  • Teaching with GitHub

    Several of my courses could benefit from a unit on GitHub. I want to devise a series of lessons that could be plugged into any of these courses with only a slight amount of modification specific to the actual course. It’s easy to identify the aspects of GitHub that I want to cover: version control […]