Each week we scour the fringes of the world wide web for new ways to streamline, enhance, and improve our coding development workflow; these are the top five most badass finds of the week, handpicked by former coding bootcamp graduates for the student developer community.
Table of Contents
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A Google Sheets Doc w/ Please Note: This is a work in progress
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Weekly Repo Content Summary
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Interview/Interview Progress Tracker
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CSKb Slack Community Please Note: This is not yet setup
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CSKb Tip/Idea Submission Form Please Note: This is not yet setup
A list of awesome beginners-friendly projects
- awesome-for-beginners is a list of projects that are perfect for recent coding bootcamp grads looking to spread their wings and start contributing to real-world open-source; the list is language agnostic, there is a community for everyone, from Gophers to JavaScript junkies.
Inspired by First Timers Only blog post.
If you are a maintainer for open-source projects, add the label first-timers-only (or similar) to your project and list it here so that people can find it.
If you are looking to contribute, then explore this list, look at first-timers-only labelled open issues on Github, and follow @first_tmrs_only on Twitter to be notified when a new first-timers-only issue is created.
If you are not a programmer, but would like to contribute, check out the Awesome for non-programmers list.
We ❤️ the simple and descriptive 'labels'...
to the right of every project on this list, they remove the 'barrier' of guesswork; it essentially lets you gauge the 'difficulty level' from 'easy-peasy walk in the park' to 'hard as hell.'
(label: help wanted)
(label: first-timers-only)
(label: good for beginner)
(label: starter bug)
(label: Up-For-Grabs)
Everything about this is awesome because...
... it makes the experience of selecting which open source project to contribute to painless, there's no need to waste countless hours on researching the best community project to support and end up selecting one that is not so 'first-timer' friendly.
There's no need to risk burnout or giving up from frustration when this awesome resource exists.
A website which shows a list of traffic graphs of your own GitHub repositories
Forked repositories are currently filtered out. If you need them, open an issue and I will provide an option to show them as well.
Repo Example & Website
Try the demo yourself by clicking the image below ⬇️⬇️⬇️.
This is a great tool for coding bootcamp student developers because...
... I wasted countless hours manually looking up the 'traffic' stats of my repos when I was in a coding bootcamp, I wish I had known about this project.
My 'student developer' experience was unique, for the first time in my professional life, I found myself in a technical environment without the analytical metric KPI data sets I relied upon for years to make informed decisions; so I starting using link-shorteners to monitor and gauge the click-through data reports for hyperlinks in my work.
Christopher Lee(@iTrauco) ❤️'s his KPI metrics and tabular data sets!
Apple introduced me to the world of large-scale data collection and analysis; in one role, I worked closely with Content Management & Services(CMS) and was fascinated by their use of click-through rate analytics as a KPI to correctly predict the existence of unknown and soon-to-be emerging issues within minutes of releasing a new iOS update, e.g. the global pull of the iOS 8.0.1 patch within 60 minutes of release.
I was training as a Carpe Facto(Cease the Facts) Advisor, the frontline root-cause analysis team of Apple, during the iOS 8.0.1 fiasco. Within 8 minutes of release, my team was alerted to the frontlines because of drastically increased click-through rates of certain links leading to cellular-data specific self-help tech support articles in Apple's public-facing Knowledge Base(Kb).
Apple had refined its global ITSM self-service escalation matrix strategy to the point of confidently knowing that, upon release of a new iOS update, that the bulk of immediate OTA installs would done by the company's most tech-savy customers; you know, the type of people who hate calling tech support because they prefer to troubleshoot and fix it themselves.
So, basically, Apple CMS knows that a sudden and drastic increase to specific Kb self-help articles in the immediate hours after an update means that their 'techiest' of customers are trying to resolve an unknown 'bug' or 'breaking change' that is occuring as a result of updating to the latest version of some Apple proprietary software.
The impact from the bad PR and damage to the company's reputation for failing to 'properly test' temporarily tarnished the magic of the 'Apple product experience,' where everything is 'intuitive' and just 'works as expected', for millions of customers, and, as a direct result of the cmpany's iOS 8.0.1 'oops' moment, the Apple Beta Software Program was established.
After leaving Apple, I learned harness the power of Google Analytics with a former passion project called Nerdy Pug Studios...
Metrics, no matter how simple, can provide anyone with powerful insight, and I spent countless hours manually looking up GitHub 'Traffic' stats to see the 'unique views' and 'clones' for a multitude repositories; I have mad respect for this project.
GitHub only shows that last 14 days of 'traffic' stats, so I had to manually record these numbers...
Shortly after my Demo Day graduation from code school, I took the time to figure out the process of integrating a custom-link shortener with Google Analytics... 🤯
Emerging Work/Impact
GitHub only tracks and displays the last 14 days of repo traffic data; finding this project inspired me to look harder for a solution that would allow me to not only view traffic data for all repos, but also collect and store it systemically overtime to form a tabular data set for analysis.
There is so much great code out there, but it's all in Python, like this gem, github-traffic-stats, and all I know is NodeJS...
It will take some time, but learning Python in-depth is now a high-priority skillset I am actively developing to really dive in deep with data analysis as a hobby.
A command line interface for Git Checkout. See branches available for checkout.
- Check it out, before you checkout.
Check It Out lets you interactively see and choose what branch you want to check out without the hassle of trying to type out a long or confusing branch name. Checking out branches just got even simpler!
Command Line Interface Workflow Example
Oh Sh*t, Git!?!
- The BEST Git Documentation for your first coding bootcamp group project 'git' workflow headaches and conflicting merge frustrations...
Git is hard...
... and this badass tool can have you 'killing it' like the startup performance feedback of your dreams!
Nearly every page on GitHub has a keyboard shortcut to perform actions faster.
- Official Documentation shortcuts to automate the most common GitHub tasks you do in the browser.
The easy way to know how many people are viewing your GitHub projects!
- HITS! Badge
we're kinda obsessed with tearing this thing down at the moment for use as a real-time alert notifcation system for gauging the responsiveness/engagement of click-through rates for content shared on social media platforms, e.g. LinkedIn, from CSKb repos.
- The question is this, "Can immediate traffic spikes in the form of GitHub repo views in the immediate minutes following a release be used as an indicator to identify previously unknown 'bugs' by people coming to the official 'Documentation' for help, similiar to Apple CMS?"
Frequently Asked Questions
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