code documentation

This week, the Elixir Wizards are joined by Yohana Tesfazgi and Wes Bos to compare notes on the experience of learning Elixir vs. JavaScript as your first programming language. Yohana recently completed an Elixir apprenticeship, and Wes Bos is a renowned JavaScript educator with popular courses for beginner software developers. They discuss a variety of media and resources and how people with different learning styles benefit from video courses, articles, or more hands-on projects. They also discuss the current atmosphere for those looking to transition into an engineering career and how to stick out among the crowd when new to the scene. Topics Discussed in this Episode Pros and cons of learning Elixir as your first programming language Materials and resources for beginners to JavaScript and Elixir Projects and methods for learning Elixir with no prior knowledge Recommendations for sharpening and showcasing skills How to become a standout candidate for potential employers Soft skills like communication translate well from other careers to programming work Learning subsequent languages becomes more intuitive once you learn your first How to decide which library to use for a project How to build an online presence and why it’s important Open-source contributions are a way to learn from the community Ship early and often, just deploying a default Phoenix app teaches deployment skills Attend local meetups and conferences for mentoring and potential job opportunities Links Mentioned https://syntax.fm/ https://fly.io/ https://elixirschool.com/en Syntax.fm: Supper Club × How To Get Your First Dev Job With Stuart Bloxham (https://syntax.fm/show/667/supper-club-how-to-get-your-first-dev-job-with-stuart-bloxham) Quinnwilton.com (https://quinnwilton.com/) https://github.com/pallets/flask https://wesbos.com/courses https://beginnerjavascript.com/ Free course: https://javascript30.com/ https://pragmaticstudio.com/ https://elixircasts.io/ https://grox.io/ LiveView Mastery YouTube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7T19hPLqQ-Od3Rb3T2OX1g) Contact Yohana: yytesfazgi@gmail.com

What makes for good documentation? In this episode, we dive into one of the most important yet overlooked facets of coding. With us are Omer Rosenbaum and Tim Post of Swimm.io. Swimm is an app that allows you to create docs coupled with your code, which are auto-synced and integrated into your workflow. It makes for much more efficient, elegant, and accessible documentation. 

Omer is the CTO of Swimm, and Tim is Principal Development Relations and User Advocate. They are the experts who will guide us through good code documentation practices and tools, as well as share some fascinating real-life examples and stories.

This episode touches on the following key topics and ideas:

00:01:20 Introducing Omer and Tim

00:03:28 Omer: learning tech while in the military

00:06:36 Israel Tech Challenge

00:08:32 Impostor Syndrome

00:12:15 Tim: the consulting career route

00:18:15 Stack Overflow elected moderator

00:20:59 ZFS and Btrfs 

00:22:49 What is good code documentation?

00:34:48 Documentation and remote work

00:36:99 Good practices

00:40:37 Code comments

00:45:20 How to write documentation

00:46:59 Signs of bad code documentation

00:48:05 Swimm overview

00:53:21 PyTorch documentation

00:54:45 PHP documentation

00:56:34 Swimm’s CLI tools

01:01:16 Code documentation horror stories

01:07:26 Swimm offers for open-source projects and enterprises

01:13:47 Working at Swimm

01:19:54 The value of remote work

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Tools

• Swimm https://swimm.io/
• ReiserFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReiserFS
• PyTorch https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/index.html
• Electron https://www.electronjs.org/
• Git https://git-scm.com/
• Stack Overflow https://stackoverflow.com/

Catch Swimm on:

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

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Writing documentation is an art and there aren't many cut-and-dry rules that will guarantee the right documentation quality. In this episode Patrick and I chat about our lessons learned and also cover a bunch of ways to document and write self-documenting code. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/04/episode-76-code-documentation.html

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