LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 2:48 pm Post subject: Code Camp

I just went to my first Code Camp this weekend. It was 12 hours of fun and excitement. I had a really good time, I can't say that I learned a ton, but I did learn somethings and some new concepts.
The biggest piece of Knowledge that I came back with is that I a not that bad of a programmer. Spending 12 hours with 200 some odd programmers I figured I would be made out to be a N00B but I held my own, and in most cases had shown them different ideas, or different constructs to use. So right now I am pretty proud of myself and my knowledge, I honestly did not believe that I was this good.

I went to 5 seperate classes.
1. Protecting Web Forms from SPAM.
2. Advanced IP
3. PHP
4. CSS, JavaScript and DOM
5. Advanced Data Structures using T-SQL

The first class was OK, it was more focused towards SPAM on Blogs. Most of what we covered was things that I had already tried out, but never really tried in conjunction with each other.
The SPAM protection was broken into 5 categories, and used in conjunction with each other on a point system.
1. Mouse Movement
2. Keyboard usage
3. Form Time
4. Hidden Fields
5. AKismet
I don't have the code now for all of these, but when I get it I will post it.
The First one is a JavaScript program that monitors mouse movement, and you can put on a minimum pixel movement
The Second one is another JavaScript program that just verify's how many keys were pressed, and you can setup a minimum for that also.
The Third one uses a seeded time and has a minimum and a maximum time limit. I found it odd to have a maximum time limit, but it was explained with an example that a bot downloaded his site with the seeded timestamp and 3 days later tried to post to his blog. So he has a 3 hour time limit for submissions.
The Fourth one just uses a CSS visibility to hide the form field, and on submission it checks to see if something was entered into the field, if something is in the field then that part of the check fails. The form also had text next to the field saying "Do NOT enter anything into this field" just in case of the visually impaired software reading the field.
And the last one is AKismet which is a 3rd party vendor that examines posts and deems whether they are spam or not.
Rather than disqualifying for the post on 1 or 2 failures you setup a point system. Because some people don't use the keyboard on the form, they just paste using the mouse, or they would just tab through the fields. So it supposedly works pretty well, and it is all transparent to the user.

The second class I went to was Advanced IP. It was pretty cool, I basically learned what I need to do to write my own download manager just using Telnet. So I will play with that and post my code on it when I get to it.

The 3rd class sucked. I should have taught it but I wasn't sure what a Code Camp was, so I didn't feel comfortable doing it. And the guy that taught it pretty much just talked about his thesis for college, and how he just got this kick ass job. And yes I am jealous of his kick ass job. But his thesis page he built I thought was pretty crude. He took a server cluster and just monitored how it was running. He didn't even use the GDI for drawing of dynamic pictures for the GUI part. He took a bunch of pictures of pie charts, and dependent upon the threshhold is what picture gets displayed.

The 4th class was pretty good, the speaker I thought was excellent, I just thought the class lacked content. And I learned that I probably never want to play with DOM. :shudders:

The 5th class was extremely good. The content of it was stuff that i pretty much already knew how to do except for the stored procedures. And I got to have a one on one with the guy and ran some of my database structures past him and asked for some advice. And he said that my structures and designs were perfectly fine, and all my problems will result from piss poor hardware. He did say that I need to runs some crons and such on it, and some stored procedures, but past that I did a good job.

I feel so much more comfortable coding now that I have been reassured that I do in fact know a little of what I am doing. Very Happy

I'll post code and such as I get it.

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:06 pm Post subject:

Now you have something very cool to put on the cover letter for your resume. You could probably put it on your resume too.

I mean it.

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:24 pm Post subject:

EdisonRex wrote:
Now you have something very cool to put on the cover letter for your resume. You could probably put it on your resume too.

I mean it.

The fact that I went to code camp? Or that I had professionals verify my work and tell me I did a good job?

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 3:25 pm Post subject:

Skookum wrote:
EdisonRex wrote:
Now you have something very cool to put on the cover letter for your resume. You could probably put it on your resume too.

I mean it.

The fact that I went to code camp? Or that I had professionals verify my work and tell me I did a good job?

Uh. both?