I have a working website with a fair amount of content on it, but I'd like to change the landing page to a simple, sleek design with a few buttons to dive deeper.

i.e. like this except that clicking on the buttons would take you to a different page.

How difficult is it to go from a Photoshop concept of that landing page to implementing it on the site? And how would one go about doing it?

I thought long and hard and this is the best piece of advice I can give on object orientation. At least that's the one snipped of advice I'd send myself back in time.

[well maybe lol-mutable state harhar it's a tarp]

Do what's more fun and don't question your choices.

You could try http://www.psd2html.com/

Also, check out a site like http://themeforest.net/popular_item/...site-templates - if you can find something you like its probably going to be your cheapest solution.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

****ing hilarious

Ha, remember watching that a few months ago. I can see some of those issues being quite serious (or certainly causing developers a serious headache)!

One of my programmer coworkers types with 2 fingers... I find this maddening. How can someone who types for a living possibly not learn to type better? I can't stand going over to help her with something and watch her type unbelievably slow and she makes a ton of mistakes.

My typing style is bad too but it doesn't effect me too much because the accuracy is high. I don't quite use 2 fingers but I definitely don't type the standard way. My hands fly all over the place and I often use only my pointer+middle fingers and thumbs on each hand. About 85% of my typing are with those 6 fingers and I'm never just sitting on the home row.

Does anyone else have weird typing styles?

This is pretty much me too. I learned wrong early and never unlearned. I think I've added some extra finger functionality over the years, but it's definitely not standard.

With some effort and a fairly simple design / functionality, do you think I could create the landing page code myself? There are tons of tutorials like this out there, though I'm not exactly sure how to integrate it back with the rest of the site (which is currently running on Shopify.)

What would you be buying with a theme such as on themeforest? I'm not entirely sure how all the pieces fit into a working webpage.

Of course, those that type slow will tell you that they spend 80% of their time thinking, so of course there is no need to learn to type, besides, any decent IDE lets you do fu-{TAB}.

The fastest typist in the world has a fairly unorthodox style. I think many super-fast typist do.



I think that my typing has become more unorthodox the more I learn to type faster. For example, I will hit keys with the wrong finger and often use my pointer to hit the space bar. I also use a ton of hot-keys, so the layout of the keyboard sometimes works differently in my head. I tend to keep my hands very low so I can easily access Alt and Ctrl.

good typing is all about flow, noobs. my shaolin temple style defeats your monkey style:

I type 100 WPM this way. No one ever notices i type weird. Probably gonna get carpal tunnel 10 years early.

confirmed freak :P

curious how many wpm do you type that way?

i've been reading the "all time 2+2 thread" draft, so now i really really want this tangent to turn into a hu4rollz-style mavis beacon contest

People who type with 2 fingers or who type slow are fairly common. Like daveT said, One of the developers my friend worked with said even though he typed slow, the things he did type were more powerful.

http://play.typeracer.com/

I never really knew. I did a few of these and cracked 80 a few times, but man, my accuracy is in the tubes today. Or maybe I don't have a good feedback loop for this stuff. You know it's bad when I can't type "(words go here)" accurately.

I did notice I did that a few times, so apparently it is natural for me now. I probably picked up this habit from using Excel and Emacs, where hitting the space key is often inconvenient any other way. Usually it is followed after hitting . or , .

Its very had to say. IMO it will be harder than you think, but if you have the time to put some hours into it, then go for it!

When you buy a theme from a site like themeforest you basically get a boilerplate template which includes all the HTML/CSS/JS and examples of all the features of the template (tables/lists/text etc). Its then your job to jig it all around and insert your own content.

g_m:

I didn't forget about our discussion, but I did end up pondering some more, writing this crazy thing with code samples from five languages before noticing that you're right and the definitions in my head are at least slightly nonstandard (I think the point where I realized my in-head definition arguably excluded Common Lisp reductio ad absurdumed itself). So while my classification is useful to me for remembering how the language works, and may be useful in general, I don't want to engage in semantic debate until I'm sure something would come of it. That said, I have to ask you to clarify a definition:

Here is a sampling of code involving blocks:

You can't assign blocks as values, or print them, or assign them to variables, or do anything at all with them except pass them to a method that accepts blocks (and even then not as a parameter). Even if you try to trick the language into using one as a value, it automatically creates a Proc. I'm not sure what definition of object applies to something that behaves in such a way; it feels more like a syntactic construct.

BTW, I have another informal poll about a pedagogical thing. The main reason I've been thinking about Ruby is that I've been taking a MOOC that uses Rails. They go into Agile stuff about halfway through and the last big assignment is meant to teach TDD. This is a class for undergraduate students. In this assignment:

-They recommend writing tests first
-This is the first assignment using test-first development
-This is the first assignment featuring mocks/stubs/fixtures
-This is the first assignment that includes generating your own spec file
-This is the first assignment that requires writing unit tests at all
-This is also the first assignment involving a database migration, adding methods to a controller, and the attendant routes in RoR

I mean, even if you're a big fan of TDD this is pretty nuts, right? I noticed after the fact that one of the professors mentioned that unit testing was a sticking point for students in the course last time and I'm drafting an email explaining why I think that is. Just in case I'm about to say something stupid, here are the broad points I plan on making (which ones people object to tells me which ones I should spend more time justifying and/or reconsidering):

-If you're writing tests in a framework you've never written tests before, for tasks you've never performed before, writing tests first is more than twice as hard as the other way around

-This is because at such an experience level, writing tests is harder than writing the actual code. Not writing tests+code is harder, just writing tests is harder.

-Too many iterations of write test/write code/test fails/discover bug in test is probably the best possible way to turn someone off of TDD

-The only way to notice a bug in simple test code is to write the code it's supposed to test and notice it's incorrectly failing. This provides an overwhelming disincentive for beginners to write tests unless either they write them after writing the code, or the assignment is specifically about tests and only about tests

-Therefore, regardless of the merits of testing first in the general case, it's a complete failure pedagogically because for the sufficiently inexperienced it's objectively wrong

-They might want to fix their grader so that you can't get 100% test coverage by deleting all the tests.

A block *is* a Proc. It's just a convenient syntax Ruby provides for making anonymous Procs:

And you can certainly assign them to variables:

fwiw, i think you are right about TDD and very early beginners. I can be introduced fairly early, though. but this is probably one of the religious pedagogical battles you can't win.

EDIT: Just to answer your questions more fully, the syntax errors you are seeing are just that: syntax errors. They don't prove anything about what a block is, just how you are allowed (or not allowed) to write them within certain types of expressions (eg, assignment). A good analogy would be array literal syntax in Java. Many people wish they could write:

But you can't. That doesn't tell you anything about arrays per se. It's just that java's syntax for array literal assignment is:

xhad,

i'm an ardent tdder and i agree with everything you wrote. you certainly can't touch meaningfully on all those facets in a single lesson. you tdd so-so, squish like grape.

I do and it has always kind of bothered me but I never had the time/enough desire to fix it. Did some speed/accuracy typing test a while back and the results were pretty good so it's not like it's holding me back in any major way.

Currently I don't see any benefits in typing any faster (other than the desire to be better :P). I could type half as fast and my programming skills would not suffer at all. Thinking is the "bottleneck"

Edit after reading more posts: I think the flow argument could be valid. I enjoy flow and it's pretty addictive so eliminating a potential flow breaker would be cool. Good noise cancelling headphones+harder than normal problems are usually my goto recipe...harder problems mean I type very little/minute. Maybe my workstyle is odd but I spend a lot of time scribbling on paper and comparatively little time "encoding" my thoughts. I type most WPM when I'm exploring stuff/prototyping etc.

@Xhad: It also makes very little sense to me that tests come this late. They should be the first thing not something tacked on at the end. I'd much rather start with TDD code that has nothing to do with Rails and just teaches testing principles than how they do it now.

I went to a high school that issued laptops to all students, it was how we took notes in class and handed in assignments and what not.

Freshman year I had to take a typing class and actually payed attention/diligently did the assignments.

It was hands down the most useful and valuable thing I got out of high school. Maybe I'm weird, but being able to type the "right" way makes typing somewhat pleasurable in and of itself, lol.