Por Ejemplo

September 30, 2016

Happy Coding now has examples! And a forum! And a guide on how to contribute to open source (even if you aren’t a programmer)!

This is pretty much my “vision” for the site: a bunch of tutorials, a bunch of examples for each tutorial, a place to ask questions, and the ability for other people to get involved if they want to.

In other words, this site is now at the minimum viable product stage. It has all of the core features, and now it’s “just” a matter of building on top of what’s here. I’ve built the house, now I just have to start putting furniture in the rooms.

We even have our first question on the forum and our first open source contribution (thanks Luke!), which is pretty neat.

Writing the examples was really fun, and it brought me back to exactly what I love about programming: creating bite-sized programs that invite experimentation. That feeling of “what would happen if I changed this variable…” is exactly how programming should feel, and it’s the whole point of starting this site.

(If you like this art, see the random walker example to find out how to create it!)

I’ve got a lot of ideas (and if you want to help with those ideas, here’s how). I think the next thing I’m going to do is to add the ability to interact with the code in the tutorials and examples. That might just be a link to a CodePen for each, or maybe I’ll directly embed it in the page so you can play with it right there.

Then it’s just rinsing and repeating: adding tutorials, adding examples, adding features that sound fun to implement. I’d also like to add a section specifically for teachers (stuff like lesson plans and whatnot), but that’s still pretty fuzzy right now.

I’d love to hear from anybody reading this (note to self: maybe add comments to the blog posts?). What do you think of the tutorials and examples so far? What features would you like to see?


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://happycoding.io/blog/por-ejemplo