Code Archives - aster.cloud

4 min

Build a Python App to Alert You When Asteroids Are Close to Earth

Being alerted when asteroids are close to Earth is crucial for several reasons: When you woke up one morning thinking about Armageddon and how fragile we are as a planet if an asteroid comes our way. I am also intrigued by exploring space and the technologies available from my desk. I will show you how to combine two APIs to be alerted via SMS when an asteroid is passing nearby (relatively speaking). NASA OpenAPI The first resource is NASA’s open API portal. You could use tons of great interfaces for your ideas, but the one that interests me, in this case,…

4 min

Tiny Snippets Of Code That Changed The World

Only a few short lines can have a massive, global impact. In 1997, Ethan Zuckerman broke the Internet — by inventing the pop-up ad. He was working for Tripod.com, an online service that let people make little web pages for free. To make money, Tripod sold ads that ran alongside the pages. The problem was, ads would wind up running next to racy content — a user’s page devoted to anal sex, say — and advertisers did not like this. Zuckerman’s boss asked him to figure out some solution. Wasn’t there some way to position the ads so they weren’t right next…

5 min

10 Tips For Writing Clean Code

Clean code is a reader-focused development style that produces software that’s easy to write, read and maintain. Knowing how to produce clean code is an essential skill for software developers. Often, you may be tempted to consider your work complete when the application operates as expected. But we’re not merely writing code for computer consumption. Clean code is about recognizing that your audience isn’t just a computer, it’s real-live humans! With this principle in mind, let’s review the reasons clean code matters and dive into some tips and tricks when it comes to how we can do it in practice. What…

5 min

Programming

The Future of Javascript: Entering Into ShadowRealms

It sounds dark and mysterious – but it’s just another future Javascript feature. The ShadowRealm is a new feature coming to Javascript, which will let us create a separate global context from which to execute Javascript. In this article, we’ll look at what the ShadowRealm is, and how it works. Support for ShadowRealms in Javascript ShadowRealms are a Javascript proposal, currently at Stage 3. As such, ShadowRealms do not have support in browsers or natively in server-side languages like Node.JS, and given it has had many changes over the years, there is no stable babel or npm plugin to polyfill…

9 min

Is Your Code Overly Complex?

We’ve all been there. Taking a look at a repo that we can’t quite make heads or tails of. Or looking at a function, reading through it, getting to the end, and then realising we’d need to read it five or six more times before we can grasp what it does. There are a handful of different ways to measure this area of code quality and to judge whether code is easily understandable, but today let’s focus, specifically on two measures of complexity – Cyclomatic Complexity & its younger sibling, Cognitive Complexity. What is Cyclomatic Complexity? The idea of Cyclomatic…

4 min

Coding Practice Sites for Beginners & Professionals

Coding practice is a way to get better at coding. This is done by typing code on a computer and having it work correctly. This process is repeated until the code functions the way it should. Coding practice may be used on any coding platform, such as an IDE or online editor. Practicing coding helps people with their programming skills and understanding of how code works. Practice also builds confidence in a person’s ability to solve problems by understanding more about programming languages and their syntaxes. A surprisingly little amount of resources are available for learning how to code, especially free resources. This…

18 min

What Was Your First Programming Language?

These 24 open source technologists share their programming origin stories. We asked our contributors What was your first programming language? but the question goes much deeper than that. There are stories to tell about who suggested it or what prompted you to learn it. If you were paid to do so, and what happened next. Then there’s a lot it says about your age and what was going on in the world. Let’s hear a little bit about these 24 technologists’ stories. What was your first programming language? BASIC Were you paid to learn it? Nope. Did you choose it? Not really. Why? It was Christmas of 1979, my…

4 min

How To Avoid Waste When Writing Code

“The more we can reduce waste in software development, the better off everyone will be.” The long road toward quality is filled with diversions, false starts, and detours. The enemy of quality is waste, because waste is never desirable. No one pays anyone to deliver waste. We sometimes tolerate waste as part of the process of making something useful and desirable, but the more we can reduce waste while making something, the better. In software engineering, waste can be expressed in a few ways: Defects Idling and waiting Overproduction Overprocessing Any other activity that doesn’t directly put value in users’…

5 min

How Different Programming Languages Do The Same Thing

Compare 13 different programming languages by writing a simple game. Whenever I start learning a new programming language, I focus on defining variables, writing a statement, and evaluating expressions. Once I have a general understanding of those concepts, I can usually figure out the rest on my own. Most programming languages have some similarities, so once you know one programming language, learning the next one is a matter of figuring out the unique details and recognizing the differences. To help me practice a new programming language, I like to write a few test programs. One sample program I often write…

4 min

Why A Computer Isn’t The First Thing You Need When Teaching Kids To Code

In 2020, COVID-19 hit, and globally, there was a massive shift to online instruction. Educators and parents realized that going forward, now that school boards have invested heavily in remote learning it has become a core aspect of education. Some people have surely been impressed by what even the youngest learners can do with technology. At the same time, it’s also become clear that our societies are going to need a generation of experts who can create whatever will supersede the huge tech platforms of our day like Google or TikTok. But success in teaching children coding is not about…

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