Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with development

iPad as second monitor?

geoff. — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 16:37:52 -0800

It has been years since i had proper development setup with two large monitors. I have the largest MacBook Pro and spend most of my time pre-Covid in airport lounges, client conference rooms and wherever I could fit. Things are beginning to spin back up again and I'll probably need to be 25% in some sort of office where I'm only guaranteed power and a desk. Will iPad Pro plus stand work well as a second monitor or is it just too small and distracting? Is there a less expensive but equally as slim/high resolution as iPad Pro? I would ideally have two 22" monitors but I resisted setting this up at home because it is more jarring going from a nice setup to a single monitor. I'd prefer to have the same experience wherever I go. I spend probably 10-15% heads down development, the rest is management stuff where a second monitor is more of a convenience. If the answer is that it is a nice novelty at first but not a great second monitor solution that's fine too. I primarily do web development so I'd have usually a monitor with my IDE and another with a web browser to see the results.

What should my job title be?

snarfois — Wed, 23 Jun 2021 08:54:04 -0800

(Asking on behalf of a friend.) I'm in the process of moving to a different team at work. It's a new role, and I'm being asked for input as to what my new job title should be. The company I'm with evolved from an agency background, and is actively resisting improving their processes and communication. Recently, a new VP of Engineering has been hired partly to address this, and to drag the company out the fog of war.

This aligns with what I've been trying to do, and I've been asked to support the VP in this mission.

I will be in charge of defining and implementing processes for software development, also for documentation, and also to suggest technology and practices to improve our quality and speed of delivery.

What should my job title be? I won't have anyone reporting directly to me, but I will be moving lots of people's cheese.

Learning to Learn + 'Superlearning' + Memory development

firstdaffodils — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 17:26:33 -0800

How did/do you prep for information intake? How did you build skillsets to develop the knowledge for your degree/craft/profession? How do you maintain? In terms of learning advancement, looking for adventures in memory development, "superlearning," or just tools to better affect abilities to create and maintain skills. References to epistemology, personal stories or techniques, welcome, also.

Seeking to cultivate knowledge within reason. Superlearning is a new term (new to me), please no referrals to 'genius' creators, supplements, etc. Practical applications preferred.

Current tools are The Art of Memory and speed-reading courses.

From Concept to Code? Ingest checklist, present follow-up questionnaire.

Sockdown — Sat, 06 Feb 2021 13:51:42 -0800

I'm a longtime dabbler in coding, and for the first time have a project that goes beyond the usual paint-by-the numbers stuff I'm used to. I'd like to create a web-app that ingests a checklist (in PDF form with the metadata intact or scanned) determines which boxes on the form are checked, and uses that to present appropriate follow-up questions for user input. Then I need take those answers and put them into a database such that the information can be used to fill out other documents or merged into that user's CRM entry, etc.

My dabbling thus far has been mostly language agnostic, so while I'm most comfortably with Python I'll live if I should be doing this in Rails or some Javascript based thing.

This will begin life as an internal tool but it would be neat if it had potential to turn into something I could market to others in my line of work.

I've tried building what I need in existing universal form apps like Formstack and Wufoo and etc and none of them were up to the task. (Not interested in having to buy into something like Salesforce.)

The online database app builder things I've seen seem like they're intended more for intranet type apps than customer-facing tools, or are obtuse enough that it seems like I'd be better off just building my own web app.

So, how do I get my arms around a project like this for the first time?

I know this isn't a typical AskMe question, but there are lots of coding people here and this feels like too general of a question for StackExchange.

Is there anything remotely like Flash CS3 for android development?

wattle — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 04:49:45 -0800

I was a confident making games in Flash, but I've never been able to get into phone app development. The things I liked most about CS3 were dragging things around a visual 'screen' to see what they would look like, and the 'just works' aspect - I could just write code, output it to swf, and have a thing that worked on a web page exactly liked it worked on my computer - there wasn't any fuss with virtualenvs or anything like that. (I'm a hobbyist, not a professional developer). Is there anything out there with these features?

Tips for working with Excel as an API?

geoff. — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:49:53 -0800

I recently was sought out by a company, looking to build an Excel "microservice." Basically they want to feed data raw data in and have a proper Excel document binary come out. The CSV won't cut out the client has specific requirements. Some are simply color and branding. Others are having filter drop down functionality set. They want it to work in the latest version of Excel, for now, they did not think that Teams and Web might not behave the same. There's a lot out there like Rust Chamomile but I'm more interested in the process and pitfalls. Scale is not an issue. An excel plugin won't work. Their business model is they have sophisticated backends producing results, for whatever reason. They're a bit afraid of some simpler node modules might not be up to task or being quirky and looking to get low-level, I can't explain much but here's the workflow:

1, Company spends months analyzing a business. They create a framework, that among other things, is a bespoke Excel (and Powerpoint), this allows upper management as one of many ways to track and enact the changes in the organization. Assume that all excel docs are tailored to the company and to an extent the CEO. That's not my concern that's a data issue.

2. They're looking beyond simply export as CSV. They have good reasons for this not the least is branding, They immediately want this filtering capability but will want more. I think the larger roadmap is that calculated fields are generated in a non-Excel format and then trnaspiled from Rust/Go/Javascript/C++ to a Excel standard formulate but this is future state, In the end they want to provide a standard Excel document with no plugins that looks handmade and can exist with their support.

I'm going to ask some basic questions:

1. Is the VB API well defined that you can build off of it?
2. Regardless of legality is decompiling to see how things work a mess or just a thing you do?
4. Since this is an executable it gets tricky to deploy but say we got it in a container and ignored licensing is that the best way to have an "Excel service," where data goes in and excel comes out?
5. Again not looking to create plugins a vanilla XLSX with data and some calculated fields available,

I imagine the work could get tedious but given the other libraries this can't be impossible. I kind of of like the challenge,. How possible is this? Has someone tried to do something like this and Microsoft products are such a chore to work through doing something simple is difficult?

Current resources for 8 year old who wants to program games

Nonce — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 08:28:08 -0800

I have an 8-year-old boy who wants to learn how to program games. What are the resources I should assemble? A complete curriculum with guided exercises and/or videos would be great. We are willing to pay for good resources.

When your manager outsources all the interesting projects

winterportage — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 06:55:28 -0800

Worrying about my career development My manager is overwhelmed with everything and wants to keep hiring consultants to help manage the workload. I work in a non profit organization on the Comms team. I have about 7 years of work experience under my belt in non profits as well as IT.

The problem with this from my perspective is that I'm trying to build my career and get good experience. When my boss started she asked me my career aspirations and I told her that I was looking to work on strategic high level writing and that I was less interested in the social media aspects of Comms.

For example, we are doing a media outreach campaign that involves research and writing (two things I am good at and have done for them in the past). Meanwhile, my boss wants to start an Instagram account for our org.

My boss's plan is to hire an outside freelancer to do the research and writing project, meanwhile I'm tasked with starting the Instagram account. I think the organization sees me as the 'young hip one' so in their minds I'm the perfect person to start an Instagram, but in all honesty it doesn't interest me- I feel that I am capable of so much more, and social media seems like an entry level task to me!

Is there any way I can bring this up to my boss in a way that doesn't sound like I don't want to do my job? She has mentioned that she is very serious about staff retention, she even promoted me back in May so I do feel a sense of loyalty to her and to the organization. Is this a conversation that I could bring up at our weekly meetings, or should it wait until my next HR review (which will probably be at the end of the year?) I have noticed this is a very caring organization, they do try to make their employees happy but a lot of people simply don't have time to focus on that. Should I give it a shot or tell myself that next summer I'll apply for new jobs?

Thanks.

Which front end web frameworks to learn for data vis SPAs?

atrazine — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 03:01:03 -0800

What is the best [set of] frameworks to learn to make beautiful but relatively simple single serving visualisations on the web? I want to be able to build good looking data visualisations on that tie back into simulation / database logic on the server. All of these are basically toy single page applications that represent a particular idea. For context: I am a data scientist / strategist working in energy and utilities and I want to present some of my ideas / case studies dynamically. I also think it would be fun. My ideal is being able to build a range of single serving tools that let users adjust a few controls and then show a visual output in a variety of ways that I can heavily customise. I know about PowerBI, so assume that this is not what I want instead.

I spend a lot of time working in Python, much of it in Jupyter notebooks, have been coding in multiple languages for many years and am comfortable with CS abstractions. If there was something that had a very natural tie-in to the Python/pandas ecosystem, that would be a plus.

I have built simple websites before with Django and know the basics of JS, HTML and CSS. I am very familiar with databases.

What I am not familiar with is the universe of front end frameworks that's out there.

From my reading so far:
Leaflet is probably my best bet for GIS data
D3.js is the king of data visualisation (and can also do some GIS), an enormous amount of documentation is available (pro), super customisable (pro), I'll need the documentation because it's much more than a data vis framework and has a steep learning curve (con).

Some have also suggested that I should learn React to "tie it all together" but someone else told me that this would be a waste of time for what I wanted to do and that D3.js would do everything I needed. React Native is interesting to me but not sure it's enough to convince me that I should learn a whole additional framework.

Should I learn something like Redux that implements a SAM pattern? Ember.js?

I do not aspire to be a front end developer so ideally whatever I pick will be one or more tools with good documentation.

Starting point for a timing web/mobile app?

BlackLeotardFront — Sat, 15 Aug 2020 12:00:16 -0800

I'm looking into building a little tool I've thought about making for years, but lacking anything other than some basic CSS/HTML skills I've never been capable of it. I'd like to build a working prototype that runs in a browser and could conceivably be ported in part or concept to a mobile app. Where should I start as a total newbie? Details inside. What I'm envisioning is essentially a set of persistent timers that count up from when they were started. I figure it's a matter of storing a starting Unix epoch time and comparing that to the present one, then showing the difference in hours, days, etc. "This timer has been on for 6 days, 5 hours" for instance, with options to delete or make new ones.

I don't need to make this a polished app or anything, I'd just like to run the code and have it online to show that it works. Some day in the future I may work with a developer friend to make a "real" app version but until then I'd like to try making a simple version myself.

Given all this, where would you recommend I start as far as making this happen? I don't mind reading up a bit but really don't have any coding experience so I'd be starting from near zero (I do have a website that can host code). So if you were trying to do this in the simplest way possible, what would you use? Thanks!

Networking with your company's consultant

winterportage — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:35:46 -0800

I met someone whose work I really admire and would like to reach out Our company hired a consultant to do a complete analysis of one of our digital properties and create a request for proposals to revamp it. During her consultations with each team I got to speak with her for about an hour about my team's part of the project.

After becoming aware of other projects she has worked on, I realized I'm a big fan of her work and that I'd love to do the same type of consulting one day in my career. I would say she is about 10-15 years older than I am.

I would really like to reach out to her for a coffee to pick her brain about her career. My question is, do I need to wait until her contract with us is done? Could it be seen as a conflict of interest, given that we may or may not hire her company to perform the work that she will recommend after providing us with the RFP? Should I ask for permission now or ask for forgiveness later?

Thanks.

Children's book about a house

mcbeitz — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 16:40:47 -0800

I'm trying to remeber the name of a children's book about a farm house in the country that ends up being in the city as development have grown up all around it.

Android tablet/keyboard for testing WebGL app, or other options?

They sucked his brains out! — Fri, 22 May 2020 14:45:54 -0800

I'm participating in an open-source software project to visualize some data. The testing I've done in desktop Google Chrome's developer mode is not helping me fix Android-specific bugs, which are invariably found when the end user pulls out their Android phone, but which do not show up in Chrome on my non-touch desktop. I'd like to test how the interface works (or fails) on an Android mobile device, without buying an Android phone. 1. Crossing fingers, is there any decent software emulator other than desktop Google Chrome, which can be used for testing how the UI behaves on a Google mobile device, without buying an Android device?

2. If I have to bite the bullet and buy an Android device, can I use a tablet to emulate the dimensions and behavior of a specific Android phone/mobile screen? (Various models with screens with various dimensions; how the app responds with device rotations; etc.). Is there software to make the tablet and its hardware mock the hardware characteristics of any particular phone?

3. The engine underneath this web application uses WebGL and so any hardware device needs a decent, modern graphics adapter for testing to be doable. Is there a tablet+keyboard combination under $500 that provides solid graphics support? (I'd like to avoid a situation where I drag something and wait a second or two for something to update, that sort of thing.)

My previous experience with Android was with an Amazon Fire, and I've since had zero interest in going down that road again, but it looks like I've hit some limit of what desktop Chrome can do to emulate mobile. I also have no use for an Android phone. I'd like to avoid spending any money on the Android ecosystem, if I can, but I guess I could at least pass down this tablet to someone else, when I'm done with this project.

If there's an adequately powerful tablet/keyboard combination to be had that is within budget, since I'm out of pocket, I'd be curious for recommendations. Thanks for any advice.

Is all software bad software?

escape from the potato planet — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 17:04:57 -0800

Developers of MetaFilter: does clean production code actually exist? I've been programming since I was a kid, and I've been a web developer for 20 years. For much of that time, I was doing pretty low-level stuff – building shitty WordPress sites, and things of that nature. I was also lucky enough to be working mostly with my own code, and mostly on new development work (as opposed to ongoing maintenance of existing codebases).

Several years ago, I decided that it was time to level up my skills. So I learned a couple of MVC frameworks, got comfortable with some more advanced front-end stuff (such as Angular), etc. I fell in love with the power and elegance of these technologies.

So I made the career jump from "building shitty WordPress sites" to "application developer". I thought it'd be great – instead of shoveling WordPress spaghetti, I'd be able to architect clean, beautiful systems. I'd be able to apply the elegant patterns and principles that I'd been playing with in the real world.

And, uh – no.

After a few years, I have yet to see a single production codebase that isn't a nightmare. Those clean, clever architectures and paradigms that people illustrate in programming blogs? They don't seem to exist in the real world. At least, not as more than wishful thinking.

Real production code, from what I've seen, is duct tape on top of Band-Aids on top of chewing gum. It's a maze of half-broken, uncommented functionality, which no one fully understands, written with half a dozen competing styles and philosophies, which works just well enough to not explode.

In short, it's exactly what's described in the first three paragraphs of this article.

To be clear: I don't blame other developers for this state of affairs. I don't even blame management. It seems to be an inevitable consequence of the demands of business. I sure don't have a solution.

My question is: Is this just how commercial software development is? If I continue on this career path, am I condemning myself to week after week, month after month of plumbing these grim tunnels?

I was born with a gift for analytical thinking. I wanted to use that gift to build elegant, useful things that make people's lives better. Not to figure out how to shit-rig a support beam to keep a shantytown from falling apart for another week or two.

And if non-nightmarish production code does exist: what industries, management methodologies, development ecosystems, etc. should I be looking into to find it?

Thanks.

Freelance web developer recommendations

jedicus — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 15:41:25 -0800

A company I work for would like to hire a contract web developer to replace a creaky old website. The project would essentially be to duplicate the existing functionality using a modern codebase and design. Can you personally recommend anyone, either specific developers or a hiring service like gun.io or Scalable Path? The site is not very complicated (~14 pages, some of which are static and most of which are simple) and was written in procedural PHP without a framework. It's relatively low traffic, and scalability is not an issue. The visual design will mostly be lifted from the larger corporate site. We would do it in-house but all of our developers are fully tasked and this doesn't justify a new hire.

We would strongly prefer for the redesign to be in (modern) PHP or Python, so that it can be handed off for future maintenance in-house. Some key considerations:

1. Best practices, including front and back-end tests and thorough documentation.

2. Reproducibility of the output. Part of the site is a faceted search with basic statistics on the results. We need to be sure, via automated testing, that the redesign will produce the exact same results as the original, bug-for-bug if necessary.

3. Design for the future: the current site has stood for over a decade. We would like the redesign to last a similarly long time, at least in its general form, so ease of maintenance is important.

In a nutshell: we're looking for someone that can be meticulous and disciplined and deliver a rock-solid, easily maintained product based on some dodgy legacy code. There is the potential for a more complex follow-on project. The budget is flexible. We are willing to pay for this kind of quality if there is a proven track record behind it.

If there's a person, company, or service that you have personally used and been happy with, I'd like to hear about it. If there's one that you have personally used and been unhappy with, I'd like to hear about that too. "Have personally used" can also include maintaining the code the freelancer wrote, even if you didn't hire or manage them originally.

Life tasks - what do we do and when

EatMyHat — Sat, 16 Nov 2019 23:04:07 -0800

So to borrow a bit of Adler’s psychological theory, every human has life tasks to complete, which we all do at different ages and stages. I’m looking to get your help making a list of what the tasks are and when most people do them in a modern, western country. Here’s what I thought of so far. - Defining your gender (am I a boy or a girl) : childhood
- discovering and accepting your sexuality (am I straight/gay/bi etc and that is ok): late teens to mid 20s
- becoming financially independent: mid 20s to mid 30s
- finding a life partner: ??

I’m really just looking to brainstorm so hope this can still count as a question. I’m especially keen to hear about life tasks which people usually undertake age 35+

Hopeless feelings software development jobs

jenbo1 — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 14:32:27 -0800

My husband is a back-end software developer. He has seen a lot of ageism in this field, and is worried about how sustainable it is for him, especially as he is thinking longer term about his career and our life. I'm not in the field so I don't have perspective on this, and I'd really welcome others' thoughts. Separately but relatedly, he also struggles with depression and when this sort of work is very deadline-based with too much happening, he gets really stressed and anxious and can spiral pretty quickly from there. Are there programmer roles that are typically less stressful types of roles that folks would recommend he pursue?

Effective, ethical, budget tech hiring?

wildblueyonder — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 15:46:37 -0800

I'm part of a small software startup that needs at least one remote web application developer and possibly part-time design/UX help, but has a budget with only room for ¼-⅓ of market rates (what I'm currently working for). What are some avenues by which I might find competent developers / designers for whom this could nevertheless be a reasonable genuine opportunity, and what are some guidelines to doing this fairly and without regrets? The obvious answers seem to be:

(a) looking towards those who might be looking to garner experience (bootcamp grads, university students, other entry level talent)

(b) looking towards those who might be outside major US metro areas

(c) perhaps looking towards those outside of the US altogether

If I'm looking towards (a), I can think of a few contact points I might try (I know a few college students and bootcamp grads who presumably have a network). (b) and (c) I suppose point towards something like Upwork?

But I've never done any kind of hiring through a platform, and have no idea what kind of hazards exist from an ethical, security, or competency standpoint. I also strongly suspect there's a number of different avenues / platforms for looking for help along lines like this, that they vary widely in terms of quality, that I'm entirely unaware of some of them, and other people may have ideas on how to do this effectively.

So I'd appreciate tips, perspectives, and stories from anyone who's managed to make remote and not-maximally-lucrative contract-to-hire tech arrangements work to everyone's satisfaction from any side (either as the employed or the employer or even an amazed onlooker).

I do not expect magic bullet solutions; I'd guess that if this were easy, everyone would do it, and good hiring under *any* circumstances probably involves domain expertise, time, and attention. I expect that will be more so in a resource-constrained situation. But I do imagine there are things I can learn from the insights of others.

(Also, I'm aware of jobs.metafilter.com, and I may well actually post there, but wanted to calibrate my compass and expectations first. Thanks!)

How do I explain to future employers why my past work looks like crap?

cowcowgrasstree — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 10:36:13 -0800

My publicly-visible past work doesn't look great for reasons largely outside of my control. What should I do? I've been doing full stack development for about 4 years now (and other development for ~15 years before that). I'm more or less up to speed on modern tooling and practices.

I've been deeply involved with two major projects. Most of the projects are internal facing: internal tools, database tomfoolery, API development, fixing the many, many issues left behind by early project decisions, etc. As such, there have been a lot of mostly-invisible successes.

At the start of each project, each company told me that they wanted a best-in-class web experience. And this is fantastic: user experience is what I really care deeply about, with the back-end work being the necessary evil to support that.

I built alpha versions of the user interfaces with the intent to enter a user feedback cycle, and both times, the project manager has said "Good enough! Never work on this again!" (Just imagine several months worth of arguments and politics and broken promises right about here...) So, there are now two alpha-quality websites, the only publicly visible artifacts of my four years of work, that will exist in the world with my name on them.

In a few months, I would like to start looking for another job with more focus on front end design and build. And since I have greying hair, I expect a bit more difficulty.

What can I do to present the best face on this to prospective employers? Should I be spending my evenings building a set of portfolio sites? Code boot camp? MOOC certificates?

Any ideas or experiences are appreciated.

Looking for a book on modern JavaScript

a device for making your enemy change his mind — Sat, 27 Jul 2019 11:15:55 -0800

I haven’t written JS in anger since JQuery was the hot thing and VBScript stalked the Earth. It seems to effectively be a different language now. Can you recommend a good book on JavaScript as it stands in 2019? I work nearly exclusively with backend technologies that have nothing to do with web sites. I am fluent in Python (hssssss), decent with Go, and can write some ugly C++ if called upon. However, even in my isolated world far from web dev, the occasional JavaScript is creeping in, and it seems to be the most common shared language amongst my younger colleagues.

However, the last time I really played with JS was probably around... 2006? Maybe 2008? And the language has evolved a ton. So I basically need to treat it as a new language, and want to make sure I’m learning the version that takes the most advantage of its new features.

However, it’s a fast-moving target, a lot of the material out there is bad, and even more is tied to some framework or other. Can you recommend a book which does a good job of explaining the modern version of the language itself?

A few notes:

I learn best from books, but a well put together web tutorial is fine. No videos please, I can’t focus through them.

Really, no web framework books. I will want to look at them someday, perhaps, but right now none of the code goes anywhere near a web page. Language-focused books are best, or perhaps something like Node which is server-side?

Transitioning to new role/leadership

5845(f)(1)(D) — Fri, 17 May 2019 10:34:16 -0800

In about a month, I'll be starting a new job that will require both subject matter expertise and management/leadership skills that I will need to grow into, in some respects. I'm very excited about the job and the fresh start. I'd be grateful for resources you've found helpful in making similar transitions, particularly in law/finance/business. I've done well at my current job, but as an "individual contributor" and I went on autopilot a while ago. I will move to an analogous role at a different employer, but as in a highly visible (and more demanding) capacity as a team leader. And while the roles are analogous, there are some significant technical areas that I will have to relearn or learn that were not relevant to my current role.

I've been doing some refreshers on the technical stuff, and developing a mindfulness practice to help me keep my head on straight when things come up that I don't know. I'm not sure what resources will be the most helpful to transition from an individual contributor to sort of "thought leader" at the new employer. I plan on finding a mentor at the new firm, as well--which will be a first for me.

If you made a similar transition, what books/practices helped you? Did you get a coach? Again, this is a business role, to the extent that it influences your answers. Also, the new role is along the lines of a VP level role, not a C suite role.

Job interview questions- aid industry

EatMyHat — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 23:15:34 -0800

I have a last-minute invite to a job interview in the development/aid industry and I’m looking to prepare. If you have been to such an interview before, what questions were you asked?

Who should we solicit for funding for a big June queer political event?

crocodiletsunami — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 13:07:25 -0800

What are some emergency or bridge grants or Foundation donations that would be good for a queer/political event in June? Here is a statement for the march. The event is in June, and we are expecting 20,000+ people.

Are there any emergency or bridge grants that we should seek out? Are there Foundations that we can apply to on short notice? Any leads are appreciated.

Tinkering on a Local Copy of a Website?

wym — Sun, 31 Mar 2019 22:59:22 -0800

How do I download a local copy of a web app (?) such that I can tinker with it? Can I then host this modified version of a website somewhere so that I can use it? The website/web app is https://teuxdeux.com/. It's a fairly simple to-do list application, with some sweeeeet built-in features, design-wise, but not a ton of extra bells and whistles. It presents each day as a list of tasks, with one column per day. You can drag and drop tasks, and set up some basic recurring tasks. You click to strike through a task; double click to edit it; double click and click the 'x' to delete it. Uncompleted tasks as automatically advanced to the next day at midnight; you can write tasks on any day in the past or future; you can make additional generic lists not associated with any days on the bottom half of the page.

The demo you see on the first page is pretty must the gist of it; the video below shows the rest of the functionality. I've been using it on and off for years and I love it, but there are just a few things that are crucially missing.

First, I'd like to add another column of tasks to the left of the days of the week. This would be identical to the generic lists on the bottom of the page, except that it exists to the left of the days of the week on the page. Currently, the user is able to drag tasks back and forth between days of the week / generic lists, and I would want to maintain this functionality.

Second, I'd like to be able to sort of sync my google calendar items with this app, such that events I make in gcal would show up as an task item. gcal to this platform is more important to me than full two-way sync.

I got partially started down a computer science major in college. I feel comfortable mucking around and tinkering with code, though I expect it will be a challenge. I have some familiarity with html/css, and essentially no familiarity with Javascript, managing data online, etc.

Would it be realistic/practical/not a huge pain in the butt to think that I could download a local copy of the website as it is, swap in the data storage aspect with something scaled for personal use, and make the changes I want? And then to host the whole thing somewhere, such that I can use it? Is that possible, and if so, how would I go about doing so? Or would it be similar, in terms of amount of effort required, to write this thing from the ground up?

This is purely for personal use.
I am 95% sure I don't recommendations for alternative to do list systems/apps, instead of a feasibility/effort guesstimate on what I'm proposing.

Bonus: ideally, at some point in the future, I would port the whole thing over also to Android, probably by building it from scratch, and use a service such as Firebase. Could I, say, use Firebase now as my data management server (?) for the web version?

Thanks!

Music's in my Baby's Brain... how to use this to help her development?

protorp — Tue, 12 Mar 2019 06:38:50 -0800

I'm looking for resources and / or experiences of the role that music, in any form passive or active, can play to aid development in babies and children, from as young an age as possible. I'm especially interested in anything relating this to kids with structural brain disorders, or other neurological conditions diagnosed pre-natally or in the very first years of life. 1 and a half years on from asking this question here, about discovering the bombshell that my, then unborn, 2nd daughter has a rare brain malformation, with an extremely wide spectrum, from relatively minor to as-bad-as-could-be, developmental implications;

I am now the father of a one and a bit-year old who is doing better, developmentally, than we could ever have hoped for back during those horrendous times. Feeding, looking, sitting, crawling, standing have all come to her on a completely "normal" schedule; she'll soon be 14 months old, seems just about to start walking unaided and already has a growing vocabulary which she uses in appropriate contexts. Particularly in repeating "no" back to us when she's been moved away from getting her little mitts into places she shouldn't :)

One aspect of her blossoming self-ness, which we've keyed into in the past couple of months, is that she has a very developed sense of rhythm and reacts strongly to music; much more so and at a much earlier age than her older sister.

She absolutely loves to slap-drum anything in front of her, the high chair, table, couch, and will start doing this following the simplest little tapped-out rhythm from us.

She also always starts swaying and bum-shuffling, really well in time, along to any music that comes on, be it played by us or set-off, by her or her big sister, from the handful of awful battery-operated noisy plastic toys we own.

I'm only faintly musical myself, having plunked away poorly on an electric guitar for a few years as a teenager before discovering a since lifelong love of increasingly obscure electronic music; my wife is pretty much a-musical, in terms of production, and the only music she would profess a truly deep love for is 80s hair rock.

We're really keen to see if this is something that we can use to help our daughter's development; I have read anecdotes from adults with the same condition as her about how music ended up playing a big role in their ability to cope growing up and moving to living independently.

Any thoughts, resources, experiences or anecdotes on this would be much appreciated.

And thanks AskMe, both in advance for this, and in retrospect having gone back to that old thread for the first time in a long while and read over everything that people wrote in response to it :)