Global Nerdy

One of my goals for this year was to finally build a finished app (well, as “finished” as any software development project gets, anyway) and put it in the App Store. That happened this week when I finished coding Aspirations Winery’s Wine Crush — like Candy Crush, but with wine — and submitted it to the App Store for approval Tuesday evening. The approval came Wednesday afternoon, and by Wednesday evening, it was available from the App Store!

The app runs on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices running iOS 9.0 or later.

Rather than tell you what Aspirations Winery’s Wine Crush is like, let me show you in a video that runs exactly one minute and thirty seconds:

Here are screenshots of the first four levels in the game. Each one is slightly more challenging than the last:

Aspirations Winery’s Wine Crush is free as in “it will not cost you a thing, ever”, and not free as in “freemium”:

If you’d like to get your hands on this app, you can click on the graphic below, which I am now allowed to use…

…or you can simply fire up the App Store on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and search for Aspirations Winery or Joey deVilla.

My thanks to:

• Bill and Robin Linville of Aspirations Winery for going along with my “Hey, let me make an app for your business”, and for rewarding me and Anitra with their friendship and a fair bit of free wine to boot,
• Robin Linville for creating most of the game’s graphics, and
• my wife Anitra Pavka for her testing, occasional prodding to finish the app, and suggestions.

Tampa Code Camp takes place next Saturday, July 16th at the offices of KForce, located just on the edge of Ybor City. It’s an annual, free-admission, community-run learning event for programmers of all stripes, from beginner to expert, from people who code for a living to programming students to hobbyists.

Every year, Tampa Code Camp features speakers presenting developer topics — largely focused on Microsoft technologies, but there’s also a “Miscellaneous and Open Source” track — and the chance for local developers to meet and hang out with their peers. It’s an all day event, starting at 8:00 a.m. and concluding at 5:00 p.m., followed by an after-party at a nearby restaurant. They typically provide free donuts in the morning, and free subs and drinks for lunch, thanks to the support of sponsors, and the work that organizers Greg and Kate Leonardo put into it.

I’ve attended Tampa Code Camp for the past couple of years, and this year, I’ll be giving the opening presentation in the “Miscellaneous and Open Source”  track:

My presentation, titled Just enough React to get you into trouble, will be a quick introduction to React, Facebook’s library for building user interfaces. I’ll explain what React is, why you might want to use it in a web project, and how to set up your computer for React development. I’ll follow up by walking the audience through a very simple single-page app written in React, giving them enough of an understanding to start their own React explorations.

Just enough React to get you into trouble will take place during Tampa Code Camp’s first time slot — 9:00 am. to 9:50 a.m. — in the “Miscellaneous and Open Source” track. I promise that it will be packed with useful information and my trademarked entertaining presentation style.

If you’d like to attend my presentation or any other the other ones at Tampa Code Camp, please register! Once again, it won’t cost you a thing to attend; registration helps the organizers plan for space, food, and other logistics matters. Be sure to check out the agenda, sessions, and speakers lists.

The details

• The event: Tampa Code Camp
• When: Saturday, July 16th, 2016, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Where: KForce — 1001 East Palm Avenue (plenty of parking!)
• Admission: Free, but you should register!

Click the graphic to see it at full size.

I made the graphic above based on this amazing tweet by Steven Luscher (@steveluscher):

Map/filter/reduce in a tweet:

map([🌽, 🐮, 🐔], cook)
=> [🍿, 🍔, 🍳]

filter([🍿, 🍔, 🍳], isVegetarian)
=> [🍿, 🍳]

reduce([🍿, 🍳], eat)
=> 💩

— Steven Luscher (@steveluscher) June 10, 2016

It’s a geeky t-shirt waiting to happen.

This is from the preface of Amy Poehler’s book Yes Please, and it tells the truth about writing:

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their ‘morning ritual’ and how they ‘dress for writing’ and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to ‘be alone’—blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.

Coding is romanticized in the same way these days, thanks to the tech success stories we hear in the news, the increasing ubiquity of processors and the rise of the Internet of Things, concerns about job security and being “automated away”…and possibly because coding looks a lot like writing. “You must learn to code!” has been the battle cry of the White House, organizations like Code.org, tech titans, millennial entrepreneurs, and even that homeless guy:

I understand the urge to evangelize coding; in fact, it’s been a good chunk of my career. There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you run a program that you’ve written and seeing a computer or device turn your ideas into action. Even after coding for decades, I still give myself a Barney Stinson-style “self-five” when my code compiles and runs as I expect.

But as with writing, between the initial rush of setting out to code a program and the point that you declare the job done is a long journey of days, months, and even years. That journey has its moments of joy, discovery and wonder, but they’re punctuated with stretches of tedium, toil, and beating your head against your desk (usually figuratively, but sometimes literally) wondering why you can’t get the damned code to work. Like many writing projects, both professional and personal, many coding projects are abandoned. Writing and coding projects are never really finished; “done” is an arbitrary point determined by the writer or coder, and both are left with a lingering feeling that their project could benefit from just a few more changes. And that homeless coder is still homeless:

Thanks to the similarity between writing and coding, I’ve occasionally paraphrased Dorothy Parker: “I hate programming, but I love having programmed.“

Want a coding-themed blast from the past featuring Amy Poehler? Here’s the pilot for a ’90s TV series called RVTV, in which Poehler plays a hacker who’s infiltrated the NRA database. She also breaks into some old-school rap: