Minimalism – Page 3 – The Renegade Coder

At long last, we reach the end of an era. Finally, after a complete year—even longer if we consider the original site—I can stop wasting time on these weekly updates. Now, normally I wouldn't adopt the mindset of the sunk cost fallacy, but I had to for this. After all, a year of perseverance as an indication of individual growth is pretty cool to see when it's finished. That said, I'm done, and I'm moving to a more informative monthly format. That way, I can spend time developing my ideas for you. Sample Programs in Every Language As you may know already, I started a series a few weeks ago called Hello World in Every Language. While the project has been fun, I'm already looking to expand it. After all, Hello World is pretty boring, and there's not much to learn with such a simple program. As a result, I've decided to detach the project from the 100 Days of Code project. That means we'll have access to a standalone repository which will have a folder of code snippets for as many languages as possible. Now, I haven't decided what the next project will be, but I'm avoiding Fizz Buzz and 99 Bottles of Beer. After all, both of those projects already exist. Bottom of Every Post Code In an effort to improve site usability, I also created boilerplate text to add at the bottom of every Sample Program in Every Language (SPEL) article. Basically, this text just links to the SPEL master page and the GitHub repository. Of course, I did this because I was actually copying that text block by hand every new article. After about 20 articles, I got tired of adding it. Actually, if I'm being honest, I decided to automate it because it became a pain to go through every post and add the new links. Now, I won't need to update any post in the SPEL collections. I'll just need to update the code whenever I add a new series. That shouldn't be too bad! Minimal Categories Yesterday, I made another major change to the site that will probably hurt my search engine rankings for awhile: I removed the Java and Python categories and converted them to tags. The decision to do this came from the fact that I'm building up quite the collection of language articles. Each article was tagged with the language. As a result, I was going to run into a problem in the future where I would have to convert tags to categories as the sets got larger. After all, that's why I had the Python and Java categories in the first place. In addition, all language articles were tagged with their language except for Java and Python because I didn't want tags duplicated with categories. To eliminate this problem altogether, I simply got rid of the categories. Now, anything code related will be filed under the code category. Of course, not everything went over smoothly. When I converted the categories to tags, the tag archives spewed errors in the breadcrumb. After a good full day of digging into the code, I filed an issue with the breadcrumb plugin. As it turns out, the issue existed because the tool that converted categories to tags never deleted the parent reference to the code category. I don't know a ton about WordPress coding, so I ended up just trashing the tags and adding them again. Overall, it took about 10 minutes, so I didn't mind. Now, the issue is resolved. Thanks mtekk! Hopefully, I don't lose my SEO efforts! Email Tutoring If you've been around for awhile, you know that I've been doing some email tutoring. While I love to tutor, the latest sample programs in every language project has been taking up a ton of my time. In addition, I'll be starting school soon, so I won't have much time to do any tutoring. As a result, I've decided to eliminate my email tutoring service for the time being. I'm not sure if it will come back in the future. For now, I've labeled everything as out of stock, but they're all still on my site. I've also removed the tutoring from the front page. Anti-intellectualism I'm sure I've chatted about this at some point, but damn, why do people have to hate on intelligence? To be completely honest, part of the reason I've backed out of social media is because everyone is just fishing for attention. If that means putting people down for being smart, by all means. Of course, anti-intellectualism is everywhere—not just social media. However, I find it even more frustrating when there are businesses using it has a marketing strategy. For instance, I just stumbled upon this tweet: well its on there now if u wanna ruin it for everyone, neil https://t.co/Q99TMgmfzZ— Netflix US (@netflix) April 13, 2018 One of my favorite services, Netflix, decided to dig up a tweet from 2013 just to be this petty. Want to know the frustrating part? People are praising Netflix for it. Apparently, science-fiction doesn't have to contain any science. After all, it's fiction, so Neil can't trash it for its inaccuracies. At least, that's what I'm led to believe by the cattle flocking to Netflix. But I guess if they're going to be petty, it's "it's." Granted, that's probably unfair considering they didn't capitalize the first word or Neil, and they used "wanna." Oh well, Mini-rant is over. Added Value Lately, I've been finding a lot of value in anime. In fact, this season, some of my favorite anime of all time have gotten new seasons. That includes Tokyo Ghoul and Steins;Gate. What a time to be alive! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvvvcpwFw5o For the first time in my life, I've actually been following the season instead of binging it at the end. Call me crazy, but I love me some Tokyo Ghoul. In addition, I've been getting a ton of value out of the WordPress Reader. In fact, it allowed me dig up my favorite post this week. In this article, the author, Ben Kurtovic, writes about a program to obfuscate Hello World in Python. It's both really funny and informative. I love it. Coming Soon to The Renegade Coder! As I mentioned in the introduction, this is the end of an era for weekly updates. From this point forward, I'll be doing monthly updates in a newsletter format. These newsletters will go out at the beginning of every month with information recapping the previous month. In other words, I'll be including links and summaries of each article I've written in the previous month. In addition, the series will continue the added value section as well as the coming soon section. I felt both of these were helpful to my readers, and they kept me honest. Beyond that, I don't have many plans. I suppose I'll experiment with the format for a bit to see what works and what doesn't. In the meantime, I'll be looking for feedback, so please leave comments!