lpnotes

We originally wanted to stick to the daily simplicity of wordle, but a "practice mode" is on our roadmap! (I agree, more practice would help people improve their auditory skills faster.)

Thanks for the bug find! That's one browser I didn't test against :facepalm:

A friend of mine recently joined a FAANG company as an engineering manager, and found themselves in the position of recruiting for engineering candidates.

We caught up.

I'm the creator of a remote-first community/open source project called CodeBuddies (a not-for-profit), and we built Jitsi into our hangouts (meetings anyone can schedule to pair program or study together) -- i.e. whenever someone schedules a hangout to meet with someone else in the community, we embed Jitsi as an iframe onto the event page.

We initially used Google Hangouts for the project in 2014, and we've been using Jitsi ever since Google Hangouts deprecated its API in 2017.

I generally love Jitsi; like Google Hangouts, it allows multiple people to screenshare simultaneously in our virtual coworking sessions. However, I have stumbled upon a couple of issues with it: - higher rates of audio or screensharing issues, especially when the participants are long distance or if one of them has a poor wifi connection, or is on an older computer. - screensharing with the browser extension sometimes doesn't work, or times out

We're actually rebuilding the CodeBuddies platform right now, and for the next iteration I am strongly considering paying for the Zoom API instead because it's more accessible to people with lower quality wifi connections and for folks on older machines.

Really looking forward to this, after having missed PyCon!

We've had a couple of virtual study group Google Hangout meetings about this book at CodeBuddies -- http://hangouts.codebuddies.org/category/data-structures-and...

IMO this is one of those books where it helps to talk about the material out loud/screenshare. The material can sometimes be dense.

Haha. NEXT SIDE PROJECT!

:)

Right now, if your study group corresponds to either HTML/CSS, Javascript, Python, or Ruby on Rails, you can propose a new hangout in one of the above Google Groups and invite people to join the hangout for the topic/tutorial you're interested in reviewing with others.

In the near future, though, my hope is that a platform will replace the Google Groups and make the study group creation process around supplementary resources (besides the ones I picked to experiment on, that is) much easier. Can give you updates on when the beta platform is up if you join the mailing list or send me a PM.

The study groups are google hangout-based, so people can participate from anywhere.

Pretty cool... are you planning to switch from Mailchimp, though? It lists $240/month as the fee for 25K-50K subscribers. I'm curious about the business model behind something like this.

I would agree -- except for the fact that as a musician, I've benefited tremendously from the recording apps that have allowed me to produce multitrack songs, record scenery as background for my videos, and edit it all together in iMovie (a program that I don't have access to on a PC).

I will need to get rid of that netflix app, though. ;)

I'll skip commenting on the actual site they're building, and zero in one paragraph I found particularly interesting:

"When he was an undergrad in 2005, Boyer, who is now 27, took a job at the Student Trade Justice Campaign, an organization focused on trade policy reform. In 2007, he wanted to build an online platform for individual chapters to organize into groups and to link those groups for national discussions – essentially what the FGA is meant to do. But Boyer couldn’t build it, he said. “I didn’t even know how to program at the point that I started with it.”

Because. Word. My first thought was: "Story of my life." Just substitute "2007" for "Summer 2010" and "Student Trade Justice Campaign" for "non-profit student organizations." I wonder how many others were inspired to learn web development because of similar motivations.

I really like the idea! Could you put in a count of the # of people who have submitted pictures so far on the top?

Neat idea. I believe this is the second site I stumbled upon that has the pro/con threads laid side by side.

Once the traffic gets going, it might be nice to see some of the featured dogfights. Would be interesting to see whether a good percentage of the "dogfights" could be nonpolitical as well as political.

Nice idea! A couple of suggestions: 1) Make the quizzes shorter than 2 minutes. 2) As avree and bherms suggested, you need an intro. before the sign-up. I'm just an impulsive sign-upper because I like checking out new sites, but I suggested the site to my friend and he just stared at it before getting distracted by something else.

What I'm saying is all opinion, of course -- not tested. But my gut reaction is that giving students ownership over sign-up (as long as the process is very simple) is less obtrusive than having automatic profiles. Anyhow, the real test is what would draw them to revisit the network. Informing them that a profile exists might draw them to the site, but tests nothing about how valuable the site would truly be.

I'd suggest e-mailing students from the school network as a marketing strategy, providing them with a Facebook Connect link, and hoping they'll be interested enough to sign up.

From a purely technical perspective, how do you build a voting mechanism like this? What common tools/languages are involved?

Disclaimer: I'm a student trying to learn front-end interactive design.