Introducing our Developer: The SlyDev Thread!

[heids]

Hmm this could be a DNS setting issue on your end. I will investigate but I have not run in to the same problem on any network yet so it is hard to work with. Are you getting a 'retry for live version' button in the top right?

I blame everything on that error message which tells me my end is fine and it's all your fault   Nope, though I remember getting that button the times when AN's server was clearly at fault (that was a 503 error iirc and this is a 502/504 error, 'bad gateway').

[Orson]

Hey Sly,

Where would you reccomend someone to start learning web dev? (Except codeacademy). Do you know like all of the languages used for web dev? HTML, CSS, JS, PHP? Do you use Ruby or RoR?

[Slydev]

Hey Sly,

Where would you reccomend someone to start learning web dev? (Except codeacademy). Do you know like all of the languages used for web dev? HTML, CSS, JS, PHP? Do you use Ruby or RoR?

Hmmm, I am mostly self taught, when I learnt there weren't many online resources, now there are so many it is hard to say which one is best. Either way it should at lest be free or close too! I used 'lynda' for a bit when we had a subscription at my old work but I don't think it had too much more info than what I already knew. For most languages you just need to learn what you can do and go from there, PHP for example has the complete syntax online which you can use for reference any time:
(Example the 'stringtotime' function http://php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php)

You can also just ask questions like "how do I convert a string to an integer PHP" you will most likely get a good detailed response, mostly on stack overflow. It is a double edged sword though, I have seen people get the solution then copy paste it in to the code without really knowing what it does. For every line of code you copy you have to understand 100% of it otherwise it will lead to issues in debugging down the track.

I know a lot of the languages but not all of them! There are new ones every month it seems too. The problem is there is so many that there is no advantage to knowing them all:

(More 'hilarious' dev comics here: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/)

So I mostly know and use the following:
HTML
CSS
MYSQL
JAVASCRIPT (Jquery as well)
PHP (Codeignighter and Yii2 Frameworks but looking at learning 'laravel' framework too)

The other popular coding languages for web are:
.NET (Microsoft's one)
Ruby (and the ruby on rails framework)
Angular/JSnode (Javascript frameworks which are quite new and gaining in popularity for both frontend and backend but IMHO still has a little while to go.....waiting on angular 2 to show up)

Ruby is really really cool from what I hear but I have never gotten a job offer for ruby so no point learning it. Basically I stick with PHP because SO MUCH of the web is PHP (Here is a breakdown http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all) showing 82% of websites are PHP.

The thing with web work is that most of the work is maintaining and fixing older websites. It is only when you get a cool new startup project that you can play with new stuff, which depending on the projects budget might not make it viable to have to learn a new language and use it for the project. It is all about finding the best solution for the client NOT about what is the coolest new thing or programming language you like most.

So do I know ruby? No I don't. Would I like to? Yeah I would. Will I learn it? Probably not unless I get a contract that has it. While in uni it is great to play with these things in reality you have to go where the money is.

Some people do stick to their guns though, I have a friend who is a full on linux guy, he makes his websites in a custom wrapper for Python and talks about how amazing it is. The problem is that if he gets hit by a bus then no-one is going to be able to work on that project which is not great for risk management at all

I hope that helped to answer your questions and give you a bit of context to my answers

[Slydev]

Okay so a couple new things that I would really like users to play with and test out:

New Notes:
http://atarnotes.com/notes/
This is a complete rebuild of the notes system from the ground up with the old data imported. It should look and act basically exactly like the old one, now that it has been remade in a much cleaner way it has a lot more potential and will be looking at a version 2 down the track based off everyone's input

Tutor Listing (Beta!):
http://atarnotes.com/tutors/
This is an old page that was removed about 6 months ago, it is designed for users to use their existing Atar accounts to make a tutor listing specifying what tutoring services they are offering for subjects in location and times and rate.  Like notes this functionality has been completely rebuilt in an effort to move away from the legacy code and system. I am hoping that now this page is back it will start to replace the 'looking for X' boards (e.g. VIC Wanted) making an easier to use and browse system for users to offer and find tutoring services. Though are at the stage where we need people using the system to see how it is received and what it is missing.

Quality of life changes:
Lots of small quality of life changes over the website, speed optimizations and legacy code removal. This work is about as fun as it sounds but really helps to clean up the site and make it run a lot quicker. Plus helps a lot with ongoing development and avoiding conflicts.

Anyways as always let me know how you all go with these tools, any feedback is appreciated and will be considered in ongoing development of the website. I have a huge list of things to do and have been wanting to get into but been caught up with optimizing the speed and methods of the existing site. I am for the most part happy with that however there is always room for improvement and things that I might have missed.

[zsteve]

Hey Slydev!
Just a minor suggestion here with the implementation of LaTeX on the forums, it seems that any equations we write automatically get rendered on a new line, consequently some posts look pretty bad. Back in the old days, they were rendered to image and then inserted inline. Would it be possible to fix this?
For instance:
To get the area of a circle, we multiply , our radius squared, by

[heids]

Which reminds me: I still can't access either notes, articles or lectures in the links in that nav bar.  I always get a 502 error.  I've cleared my cache, changed browsers, changed IP addresses, and it still doesn't work.  Yet on some other computers it works, but not consistently.  This is probably an issue on my end, but I assume it's also an issue for some others (?) and it's just worth you knowing.

[qazser]

Hey Sly,

Could ya put the blog as a tab in the nav bar. With notes, forum, articles, calc. The blog has heaps of good info but it feels neglected in a way.

[stolenclay]

Hi SlyDev,

I'm also wondering about the LaTeX situation that zsteve described above. It would be great if there was a tag for inline display and a separate tag/option to make it centred display!

Another thing that's a bit strange is the cell margins/padding for tables. Pretty sure not many people use them, but whenever I put tables in my posts there seems to be no margins at all. For example,

Code: [Select]

[table][tr][td]Cell[/td][td]Cell[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]There's no margin here>[/td][td]<there[/td][/tr][/table]gives

Cell	Cell
There's no margin here>	<there

Thanks for all your work so far!

[Stick]

lol I didn't even know this thread existed until now.

Okay so a couple new things that I would really like users to play with and test out:

Tutor Listing (Beta!):
http://atarnotes.com/tutors/
This is an old page that was removed about 6 months ago, it is designed for users to use their existing Atar accounts to make a tutor listing specifying what tutoring services they are offering for subjects in location and times and rate.  Like notes this functionality has been completely rebuilt in an effort to move away from the legacy code and system. I am hoping that now this page is back it will start to replace the 'looking for X' boards (e.g. VIC Wanted) making an easier to use and browse system for users to offer and find tutoring services. Though are at the stage where we need people using the system to see how it is received and what it is missing.

Anyways as always let me know how you all go with these tools, any feedback is appreciated and will be considered in ongoing development of the website. I have a huge list of things to do and have been wanting to get into but been caught up with optimizing the speed and methods of the existing site. I am for the most part happy with that however there is always room for improvement and things that I might have missed.

Is this actually happening or is it still in test mode? The page appears with no listings and I wasn't aware of the page because there's no tab anywhere.

I was actually going to raise this at the end of the year but the removal of the tuition board hurt me a bit in terms of getting students this year. I received far fewer requests from ATARNotes (and I only have one student from the forum this year) and I was forced to put up listings on other websites for the first time - yes, I used to only list on ATARNotes and I would still fill up all of my places. To make sure it wasn't just me I checked with a couple of other people who were experiencing the same difficulties, and some of them have reduced their activity on this forum because they felt their contributions were no longer valued (i.e. the respect that they had accumulated via helping out started to become a bit meaningless) - drastic in my opinion, but it's happened. A lot of the time when I got requests in the past the user (a student or a parent) had found the directory from a google search and deliberately signed up to the forum to contact me, and after starting work with them I encouraged them to stick around and become a part of the community themselves. I think getting this tuition board back as soon as possible would only be a benefit to the community to make sure our experienced members stay and also to grow the community with new members.

[literally lauren]

Hey Slydev!
Just a minor suggestion here with the implementation of LaTeX on the forums, it seems that any equations we write automatically get rendered on a new line, consequently some posts look pretty bad. Back in the old days, they were rendered to image and then inserted inline. Would it be possible to fix this?
For instance:
To get the area of a circle, we multiply , our radius squared, by

Courtesy of Joey, we now have \(inline\space Latex\) for all you Maths nerds.

Using [tex ][/tex] will still give you the new line version, as will $ $double dollar signs$$


But doing \ (this\) should render inline \(like\space so\)

[notjefffree]

Hey Joey! Both of us use pseudonyms online, so I guess we have that going.

Just wanted to say that if you need any help with the design elements of this site, I'm here for you! Or even if you wanna completely refresh the design of this place, I'll be there to help.

Complete newbie (only just registered) but found this place really useful before, so want to give back.

Cya around mate!

[jamonwindeyer]

Hey Slydev! I kind of love that I've done enough computing to know what this means aha; type mismatch error thrown when quoting numeric usernames. Still posts, not a huge deal

[elysepopplewell]

For the past two days I've had trouble using the Quick Reply option. When I quote someone, it moves my screen down to the Quick Reply text box, but doesn't actually insert the quote. If I open a "reply" and then insert the quote, it's fine. But just thought I'd point this out!

[Joseph41]

For the past two days I've had trouble using the Quick Reply option. When I quote someone, it moves my screen down to the Quick Reply text box, but doesn't actually insert the quote. If I open a "reply" and then insert the quote, it's fine. But just thought I'd point this out!

Had this on and off also. Seems to be a bit of a random thing!

[jamonwindeyer]

Had this on and off also. Seems to be a bit of a random thing!

Also experienced this - Refreshing the page works for me most of the time (or just doing it the old way)!