September 8, 2015 in Learn
How to Use Image Effects in Unity
Image effects in the Unity game engine can have a big impact on the look of your game. A bloom effect can turn harsh lighting into a warm sunny day, or an effect like color correction can make a landscape look…
September 2, 2015 in Learn
What Every Junior iOS Developer Needs to Know
Developing apps for iOS has been a growing sector for some time. The versatility and ubiquity of the iPhone and iPad gave scores of developers a chance to bring their wild ideas to life and parade them in front of…
September 1, 2015 in Learn
How to be a Resourceful Indie Game Developer
The thought of making a video game can be daunting. There’s code to write, 3D assets to model and texture, sound design, music, gameplay, voice acting, multiplayer, platform integration, marketing, bugs to patch… The list never seems to end. It…
August 27, 2015 in Learn
Passing the Google Interview, Without a Computer Science Degree
Parker Phinney founded Interview Cake, an interactive practice tool for preparing for coding interviews. He’s focused on shining a light on the black box of the algorithm design process, showing people how to reason their way to the best solutions….
August 18, 2015 in Learn
React: The Hype is Real
I haven’t been so excited since the early days of jQuery. React is a JavaScript library initially developed by Instagram/Facebook for building user interfaces. Since it has received a lot of attention recently with companies like Netflix, Walmart, Tesco, Airbnb…
August 17, 2015 in Learn
When is a User Story “Done?”— Acceptance Criteria and the Definition of “Done”
Have you ever worked on a team that struggled with getting things “done?” Not just “pretty much done,” but, “really done.” I mean, the kind of “done” where the work matches the expectations, the code has been tested, bugs have…
August 13, 2015 in Learn
What Does it Mean to be Self-taught?
Photo by Pratik Biyani via Flikr Creative Commons How the Idea of Becoming Self-taught Infected My Brain Long before I knew what a computer was, I would jam out to the radio while sitting in my car seat. My parents…
August 10, 2015 in Learn
How to Use npm as a Task Runner
A task is something you need to do. If you want to perform that task over and over again, as you do in development, you’ll save yourself a lot of time if you automate the process. Common web development tasks include…
August 4, 2015 in Learn
7 Good Developer Habits I Wish I’d Adopted Sooner
Learning to code, whether done through a system like Treehouse or independently, can be a heck of a journey. Much has been written about the early bouts of confusion, impostor syndrome and debugging purgatory that often turn the outwardly ambitious…
July 27, 2015 in Learn
5 Reasons Why You Should Learn Django
Django Girls Installathon at Treehouse headquarters in Portland, Ore., July 17, 2015. (Kenneth Love) I recently released Treehouse’s first Django course. So, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about why you’d choose Django over other frameworks. Django is my favorite framework…
July 22, 2015 in Learn
Thinking Ahead: CSS Scroll Snap Points
CSS recently introduced a scroll snap points feature that gives users a fluid and precise scrolling experience for touch and input devices. There are plenty of jQuery plugins available that create scroll snap effects. But instead of installing a plugin…
July 20, 2015 in Learn
So I’m Allowed to Cheat?
“So I’m allowed to cheat?” Shocked and confused, this is what my wife, Lauren, asked me late last year. Earlier that day she told me she’d like to code. I thought this would be an amazing opportunity for me as…