Someone posted this information in one of the lists I read. I thought I would pass it along for anyone interested.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software that gives the user the freedom to use, copy, study, change, and improve it. FOSS contributors believe that this is the best way to develop software because it benefits society, creates a fun collaborative community around a project, and allows anyone to make innovative changes that reach many people.
Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for FOSS projects. Participants work remotely from [...]
Last Friday I attended my first DevFest at Google headquarters in Mountain View. I’m so glad I was able to be there! Not only the event was absolutely free, filled with very interesting conferences and demos, and Google pampered us to the max with great facilities and delicious food, but it was quite an inspiring experience for me as a newcomer to this world of software and web application development.
I knew women had been encouraged to attend this particular event, but I never imagined I would see so many of them. I would say at least 95% of the people [...]
A new year has begun, full of all sorts of wonderful possibilities. The class I was taking from Rice University through Coursera has already ended, and the one from Edx will also be over in only a few more days. Although I’m satisfied with all that I’ve learned from both classes, I can’t deny I feel slightly left down by all the organizational problems experienced with the Edx class during the last month. The content is excellent, there’s no complaint about it, but for the last almost four weeks it has been updated sporadically, and the problem sets were often [...]
It’s been a while since the last time I updated this blog, probably because I’ve been too busy learning and doing, with little or no time to write about it. It’s been fun. I signed up for a couple of online classes that are offered free of charge through two of the newest initiatives for higher education, namely Coursera and EdX. One of the two classes I’m taking is called An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, and is offered by Rice University through Coursera; the other class is offered by MITx and is called Introduction to Computer Science [...]
I was using form-based authentication as a way to restrict the access to collection of resources in my project, allowing only users that had previously registered a user name and password to reach them. The user names and passwords of such registered users where kept in a database. The context.xml file contained information about this database, so it could be easily retrieved and compared with the input from the user, to verify the user had entered an existing user name and corresponding valid password. This is what is called a Data Source Realm. Here it is declared in the context.xml file.
<Realm [...]
My JSP and Servlets professor handed me down this code as a nice way to reconstruct an original request URL and avoid the temptation to ever hard-code a URL, which is also really bad practice. It’s really useful for getting out of tricky situations. In my case, I needed a way to go back to the http:// protocol after having accessed resources using SSL. I found that if I simply used RequestDispatcher, even when the resource I was requesting wasn’t included among those restricted ones, the protocol continued to be https:// . I had searched everywhere for a way to [...]
Now that the semester is over and Summer is practically here, I have some time to slow down a bit and go back to review any extra material or information that wasn’t covered properly due to lack of time. I had thought about enrolling in a class or two during the Summer term, but the ones I wanted are not offered, so I guess it’s time to hit the books on my own, while I continue to look for other opportunities.
Something I realized while working on the last school project is that I really need to polish my skills [...]
Some time ago I read a very thoughtful and inspiring article by Jaques Mattheij, appropriately titled “The Need to Code“. In his article, Mattheij describes the process that took him to learn his first programming language and how he has been hooked ever since. Even though my own experience is somewhat different to his, this article really spoke to me and got me thinking about my own “need to code”.
I remember my first contact with a programming language was when I was twelve years old, in middle school. There was an after school computer lab where they were teaching us [...]
|
|
|
Recent Comments