fromthepantothefire » Udacity http://fromthepantothefire.com "...we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torchbearers, but children of the fire, made of it..." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet Mon, 02 Jan 2023 06:32:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.41 Udacity CS 262 Programming Languages http://fromthepantothefire.com/2012/12/22/udacity-cs-262-programming-languages/ http://fromthepantothefire.com/2012/12/22/udacity-cs-262-programming-languages/#comments Sun, 23 Dec 2012 00:59:29 +0000 http://fromthepantothefire.com/?p=347 Since I announced completing CS253, I might as well note that I completed the Udacity Programming Languages class (CS262) as well. I had a lot of fun with this class. Wes Wiemer is a fantastic lecturer, keeping it interesting with extensive literary and historical references in examples, ranging from Jane Austen and Urdu poetry to The Dark City. I spent a significant amount of time just chasing down the references for fun.

This course was focused on lexing, parsing and interpreting javascript and html. It was a good reminder of how to build a lexer and parser and the wonders of recursion.

I don’t remember exactly when I finished this course (I think in the summer), but apparently I applied for the certificate in October.

]]> http://fromthepantothefire.com/2012/12/22/udacity-cs-262-programming-languages/feed/ 0 Completed Udacity CS 253 Web Application Engineering Class http://fromthepantothefire.com/2012/12/18/completed-udacity-cs-253-web-application-engineering-class/ http://fromthepantothefire.com/2012/12/18/completed-udacity-cs-253-web-application-engineering-class/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 16:41:40 +0000 http://fromthepantothefire.com/?p=343 This week I completed the Udacity Web Application Engineering Class (CS253). It was a super useful introduction to:

  • Google App Engine (my first web app framework)
  • How to architect a site
  • Glimpses of the complexity of scaling a big site
  • Password/login management, hashing, salting and secret keys
  • Cookies! (with hashes to avoid hijacking)
  • Basics of HTTP requests, GET and POST and when to use each
  • memcache, (reducing the number of database queries to speed things up)
  • using an external API
  • providing an alternate API (.json version of site)
  • permalinks
  • escaping input (to avoid code injection)

We built a blog and a wiki (since I don’t care to make them robust to spam, I won’t share them here, sorry). It was a very worthwhile introduction for me!

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