SuperHappyDevHouse 34 Interviews, Part Two

Interviews with programmers and hardware hackers from SuperHappyDevHouse 34, part 2 of 2.

Kevin Gadd talks about his dad bringing home computers for him to play with, and learning to program them, and his career making videogames. Drew Perttula’s dad brought home computers but no games, so Drew had to write his own. He got interested in visual effects and computer graphics. He works at DreamWorks Animation. Mike Lundy works for Nasa in Mountain View. He started programming around age 10 on a PCjr running BASIC. He works in the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA. He hopes the software he works on will eventually run on the Moon or Mars.

SuperHappyDevHouse 34 Interviews, Part One

Interviews with programmers and hardware hackers from SuperHappyDevHouse 34.

Joel Franusic introduces SuperHappyDevHouse and talks about how he learned programming from his dad, an embedded systems engineer. Joshua Neal shows an LED connected to an Arduino board. Jens Andersson shows a program, Colors!, for drawing on the Nintendo DS. Otavio Good shows a polar bear drawing he made using that program. Steve Okay shows an Arduino-controlled robot he built, and describes being inspired by the movie Tron to stay up all night and make a light cycle game. Ben McGraw talks about programming role playing games. Caroline Ratajski talks about how she started at age 9 with a BASIC text game, then learned web development and networking, and continued with a formal computer science education leading to her current work in communications signals analysis.

More interviews follow in part two.

Jumping Man in Pygame

Here is an explanation of a program that makes a man move left and right, and jump with the space key. It uses a formula for a parabola for determining the height of the man at every point in time of the jump. It also contains functions. Important values are stored in easy-to-change constants, for experimenting with such things as the height and duration of the jump.

Interviews with Professional Programmers, Part One

Meet some high caliber professional programmers: Dick Wall of Navigenics and The Java Posse, Bill Venners, coauthor of Programming in Scala, and Carl Quinn of Netflix and The Java Posse.

Functions in Python

This lesson shows how to use functions, to make programs shorter and more readable, better organized and easier to change, and so that we don’t repeat ourselves.

Dave Briccetti Introduces the Podcast

Dave Briccetti introduces the podcast.

Using a Python Dictionary to Give Custom Greetings

This walkthrough of greet-dict.py teaches how to use a dictionary to store customized greetings, how to convert a string to lower case to make lookups easier, and how to see if a key is in the dictionary using in.

Mr. T Guess The Food Walkthrough

This walkthrough of Mr. T Guess The Food shows a Python 2.6 guessing game with tuples, random.choice, while, if, and raw_input.

Platform Example, Very Simple

Here is a sprite that will drop onto red platforms, and gains the ability to fly from a power-up. Scratch project file.

Cat Saves the Villager Scratch Project Walkthrough

Here’s a walkthrough of Cat Saves the Villager. It shows several characters that deliver lines and interact using broadcast. Dave Briccetti created it in 35 minutes with six students in class at DVC College for Kids.

Bob Lee Videoconference With Dave Briccetti’s College for Kids Python Class

Google’s Bob Lee talks to Dave Briccetti’s College for Kids Python class by videoconference. He tells of his role as the Android core library lead, and answers questions about languages for Android and why he likes working at Google. He shows us his office mates Jesse Wilson and Josh Bloch (working with the latter being one of the reasons he is at Google).

(Video quality is poor as we recorded from a projected image with a hand-held camera.)